๐๐๐๐ก๐ ๐ช๐๐ฆ ๐ก๐ข๐ง ๐๐๐ฆ๐ฌ ๐ง๐ข ๐๐ข๐ฉ๐ ๐ฏ๐ฌ ๐ฌ๐๐๐ฅ๐ฆ ๐๐๐ข. ๐ง๐ข๐๐๐ฌ ๐๐ง'๐ฆ ๐๐๐ฆ๐ฌ.
I landed in China in 1995.
๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐๐ผ ๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐ต๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ถ๐. ๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ ๐ฎ๐น๐น.
Pollution was really bad. Some days you could taste the air.
Hygiene was a big problem. Public toilets you avoided if you could. Getting sick from food or water happened to everyone sooner or later.
Outside the cities it was real poverty. ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐บ๐ฎ๐น๐น ๐๐ถ๐น๐น๐ฎ๐ด๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ถ๐๐ต ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ผ ๐ฒ๐น๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ผ๐ฝ๐น๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐น๐ธ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฏ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ผ๐ผ๐ ๐ผ๐ป ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฟ๐ ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐. That stays with you.
Foreigners were rare. ๐ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐๐ถ๐ ๐บ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ต๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ผ๐๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ ๐๐ถ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด๐น๐ฒ ๐ผ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐ฒ๐ฟ. You became the attraction. For many, you were the first foreigner they had ever seen.
Backpacking was a real adventure. No fast trains, hardly any highways. Crossing the country meant long-distance buses on bad roads, sometimes for days.
Foreigners had to stay in designated hotels. ๐๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐, ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ฑ๐ผ๐๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ป๐ด. ๐ข๐ป๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ฒ, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ผ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐ฒ๐ฟ๐. Same seat, same room, pay more because of your face/purchasing power.
Bus terminals and train stations were crowded and not safe. Pickpockets were normal.
English was extremely rare. ๐ก๐ผ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป๐ฒ๐, ๐ป๐ผ ๐๐ผ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฎ, ๐ป๐ผ ๐ฝ๐ต๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐, ๐ป๐ผ ๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ป๐๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ. A paper guidebook, a dictionary, and a lot of pointing. Every day was a struggle.
So most foreigners did a year or two and went home.
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฑ-๐ฐ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ ๐น๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐. Not for comfort, there wasn't any. We stayed because you could feel something was happening.
๐ก๐ข๐ช?
Now I cross the country on a high-speed train at 300 km/h. On time, clean, booked on my phone in a minute. Same price as everyone else.
Pickpockets? I can't remember the last time I heard of one.
Blue sky is normal again. The rivers I avoided have parks along them now.
๐ง๐ต๐ผ๐๐ฒ ๐๐ถ๐น๐น๐ฎ๐ด๐ฒ๐? ๐๐น๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐๐, ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐, ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป๐ฒ๐. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ธ๐ถ๐ฑ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ ๐๐ฎ๐น๐ธ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฏ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ผ๐ผ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐น๐น ๐๐๐๐ณ๐ณ ๐ผ๐ป๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ผ๐บ ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ถ๐ฟ ๐ฝ๐ต๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ๐.
And a foreigner on the street? Nobody turns their head anymore.
I pay for everything with my phone. I walk home at 2am and feel completely safe. ๐๐'๐ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฏ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐น๐ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐น ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ผ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐.
๐ง๐๐ ๐ก๐๐ช "๐๐๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ซ๐ฃ๐๐ฅ๐ง๐ฆ"
Now I see new "self-proclaimed China experts" online, doing road trips in a nice SUV.
I'm not downplaying them. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ๐'๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐บ๐ถ๐น๐น๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฎ๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐น ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ผ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐, ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ช๐ฒ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฎ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐๐ฒ๐น๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐.
But it's the easy version. They see the result, not the struggle that built it.
Both stories matter. Theirs shows what China is now. Ours shows how far it came.
๐ช๐๐๐ง ๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐?
Not the people.
๐ช๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฎ๐ป๐ด๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐น๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด. Railways, roads, power, sanitation. Hundreds of millions out of poverty. With concrete, steel and very long days.
I watched it happen.
๐ง๐๐ ๐๐จ๐ก๐ก๐ฌ ๐ฃ๐๐ฅ๐ง
In the 90s the Western press called China dirty, poor and backward.
๐ก๐ผ๐ ๐ถ๐'๐ ๐ฐ๐น๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ป, ๐๐ฎ๐ณ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐บ๐ผ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ ๐๐ต๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐.
Back then you had to be a hard-core China lover to stay.
๐ง๐ผ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐บ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ.
This is a very common mistake, even among investors: the belief that a country's economic performance must mean positive stock market returns.
The truth is that there's **zero** correlation between GDP growth and stock market returns. I'm not exaggerating: Morningstar actually analyzed the historical data for 41 countries (https://t.co/TO8cjqkHJx) and found that, if anything, the relationship runs the other way: faster GDP growth meant slightly worse stock market returns.
So if your thinking is "country X has a great economy these days, let's invest in their ETF", you might as well burn your money - that's not how these things work.
China is of course the most extreme illustration of this: its GDP has grown more than 45-fold since 1992 but if you'd invested $100 in the MSCI China stock index back then, you'd have only $72 left today (before dividends).
There's some logic to it, if you think about it: for an economy to grow, money has to keep pouring into new factories, new firms and new capacity - money that would otherwise end up as profits, which are what drive share prices. Great for the economy and consumers, not so good for the shareholders who foot the bill.
Of course, this also generates problems of its own, as is the case in China: if the stock market doesn't make people any richer, households park their savings elsewhere, overwhelmingly in real estate - China's property bubble didn't come out of nowhere. And now that real estate is a bad investment too, China has to deal with capital flight: the Chinese looking at investments abroad for ways to get returns.
Which is why, over the medium run, there's reason to think the Chinese stock market may finally be worth investing in: the government is fighting capital flight with new rules (like a new 20% tax on offshore trusts) but they also need to give the Chinese a good reason to keep their savings at home, and with property "being for living in, not speculation", the stock market is the most credible candidate left.
@RnaudBertrand With copper, China often stockpiles it when prices are low and stops buying it when prices are high, their reduced demand then causes prices to fall again
I figured a similar thing might've happened here
This is one of the biggest geopolitical mysteries of the year: why did China just save the world economy?
Because, make no mistake, it absolutely did. Analysts are pretty much unanimous on this: had China not dramatically - and I mean dramatically - reduced its oil imports this year, the price of crude oil would have gone through the roof and dragged the global economy down with it.
For proof, read how Javier Blas from Bloomberg - widely recognized as one of the worldโs top energy analysts - explains what China did to Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer on their podcast โThe Long Gameโ (https://t.co/bBD8yFFUdC).
As Blas puts it, China went โfrom 11, 12 million barrels a day to less than 6 million barrels a dayโ of seaborne crude imports, and that โfreed a lot of oil for other countries, particularly in Asia.โ India, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia โcould buy the barrels that China was not buying.โ
To be clear, China wasnโt the only factor - surging US exports and the IEAโs emergency release helped too - but it was by far the biggest: JPMorgan reckons China accounted for about 74% of the fall in global crude trade (https://t.co/JCmFXYJcfh).
So it's no exaggeration to say that it is China, first and foremost, that saved the world economy this year.
If you remember the early days of the Iran war, none of this is what was predicted. In fact some US think tankers, such as the (always horrendous) Zineb Riboua from the Hudson Institute, were even cheering the war as being โall about Chinaโฆ the opening act in the larger contest against China,โ the moment the US would crack โthe central pillar of a regional order that Beijing has assembledโ (https://t.co/RaCE05TcMp).
Seven months on, what actually happened is that not only did China come out of the war unscathed economically, and strengthened strategically, it also ended up shielding the world economy, Americaโs included, from the fallout of the very war that was supposed to be its undoing.
Breaking news: if you do something thatโs supposed to be a โblowโ to someone else - some sort of 3D chess move to gain the upper hand - and they end up having to rescue you from the fallout, maybe it wasnโt such a brilliant strategic move after all.
So how did China pull it off? And, more intriguingly, why did it choose to rescue countries, including the US, from a war that Washingtonโs own hawks were openly selling as a strike against China itself?
And why do this when it effectively dampened Iran's leverage considerably, even though they're supposed to be China's "ally" (which, as we'll see, is false)?
This is the topic of my latest article. I went very deep researching all the Chinese sources I could find on this, looking at the exact legal mechanisms, and at what officials, oil refiners and state media actually said.
The answer turns out to be far stranger than I expected: no-one in Beijing actually ever ordered an import cut. China, effectively, seems to have saved the world economy incidentally, as a by-product of its own domestic policy to protect Chinese consumers.
Which is the real story here: China has become so large and so important it can just rescue the world economy as a mere side effect.
In fact what I discovered, hilariously, is that the Chinese were just as surprised as anyone else: itโs only weeks after Western media started crediting China with saving the world economy that Chinese media picked up the story. And even then, CCTVโs first take in July (https://t.co/xLPyaJeZnT) presented it as something ๅคๅช็งฐ (wร imรฉi chฤng, โforeign media claimโ) ๐คฃ
Almost like a giant suddenly waking up to its own powers. Because, that's the thing: intentions fade, consequences stay. Intentional or not, as Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, Russiaโs largest oil company, put it (https://t.co/ckinOaHzJ7), the consequence is that it's now China, not OPEC, who calls the shots on global energy markets.
The valve of global oil pricing is now in Shandong, not in Zhongdong anymore (Zhongdong, ไธญไธ, is the Middle East in Chinese).
Full article here, with how Chinaโs 20-year strategic nightmare, the โMalacca dilemmaโ, has now effectively become its leverage over the rest of the world: https://t.co/HsxPLJp45X
This is a really funny Xi video, which I've never seen before. I just added subtitles in English to it ๐
He explains the art of giving gifts to foreign leaders. The South Korea anecdote is particularly hilarious: he explains that when China had to find a gift for President Park Geun-hye, they went through her autobiography, where she wrote that if sheโd ever had a first love (she was unmarried), he would be Zhao Zilong, a legendary general from the Three Kingdoms. So they had Fan Zeng, one of Chinaโs most famous painters, paint her crush ๐
Xi canโt resist adding that Zhao Zilong happens to come from Zhengding, the county he ran in the 1980s, which makes him "very proud too."
Xiโs actual point is that good diplomacy is personal and that you need to do deep research on the people youโre dealing with: reading their biographies, knowing their taste, their history, etc. It signals respect and, as he puts it, is "a very, very effective way of reaching peopleโs hearts."
This is genuinely incredible: Huawei survived the most aggressive assault against a single company in modern history and is coming out the other side with the U.S. licensing its technology.
And ironically in the exact domains - 5G, AI, compute, networking - that the U.S. tried to cut Huawei out of.
@FaySue6@bubalov@RnaudBertrand Yes China is much more superior in fighter jets, and other military aircrafts than Russia but turns out the civilian and the military niche are very different
@FaySue6@bubalov@RnaudBertrand Yes COMAC uses GE engines for C919 for licenseing in EU and North America but the truth is Russia has a more mature civilian airline engine manufacturing industry than China. China simply doesn't care about investing into this right now...
Really interesting that Trump mentioned the Chinese origin of the term "gung ho" during his remarks at Xi's arrival ceremony ๐ (https://t.co/NB5ydHmC2T)
What he didn't mention, however, is the most fascinating fact: it directly comes from an organizational concept that the US Marines borrowed from the Communist Army during WW2.
See, during WW2, the Communists were at a big disadvantage versus both the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists: fewer weapons, less money, no foreign backing to speak of.
Yet they kept proving extraordinarily capable, scoring many victories, and an American Marine officer named Evans Carlson (https://t.co/MTNtQZDskj) decided to embed himself with the Eighth Route Army (the Communist forces under Zhu De) in order to understand why.
What he found - which deeply impressed him - was a completely different organizational culture to traditional armed forces: almost no hierarchy, officers sharing the same food and hardships as the men, open discussion of objectives, and discipline based on conviction rather than rank.
In short, the Communists' secret weapon was cohesion - the way they worked together - and Carlson came away convinced it was the model for how fighting units should be run.
He didn't quite know how to call this organizational concept so he borrowed a term from a Chinese cooperative movement he'd come across during his travels (the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives: https://t.co/abEo7GCetn), known by the abbreviation ๅทฅๅ (gลnghรฉ) which literally means "work together". It captured exactly what he'd seen in the Eighth Route Army.
Back in the Marines he took command of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion ("Carlson's Raiders") in 1942, and he adopted "Gung Ho" as the unit's motto and applied the Eighth Route Army model.
He held "Gung Ho meetings" where rank was set aside and men could speak freely and criticise, officers had no special privileges, and everyone was expected to understand why they were fighting. The Raiders became famous for the Makin Island raid (August 1942) and the "Long Patrol" on Guadalcanal (late 1942).
Carlson's Marine unit became so legendary that Hollywood made the 1943 film Gung Ho! about them (https://t.co/GeSCG9Sk3I!), which is largely how the phrase spread into general American English.
So there you have it, many ironies here, first among which is the fact that the US Marines learned to let their men speak freely and criticize their leaders by... watching the Chinese Communists ๐
Delcy Rodrรญguez is a fanatical devotee of a deranged Indian pedophilic sex-cult founded by Sathya Sai Baba. Here are photos of her in India worshipping at his altar. This pedophile sex-cult has a division in Israel, and was spread there and to the West by Zionist Jews. Chavez hated Delcy and expelled her from the top leadership of the Bolivarian movement. Nicolas Maduro is also a devotee, inducted into the cult by his wife after it had already become public that its founder was a pedophile mass rapist. After he succeeded Chavez he brought his fellow cult-member Delcy back into the leadership, and now she is the Mossad-CIA appointed Dear Leader of the country, after the fake kidnapping of Maduro who keeps publishing messages via his family/son about how awesome everything is and laundering the slogans her regime is using. All of this is in violation of the Venezuelan constitution which requires an election in the absence of the democratically elected president, but that is just a piece of paper no one in the Mossad-CIA regime gives a shit about.
If you look on YouTube for Sathya Sai Baba, you will find a documentary on his pedophilic nature titled "The Secret Swami Satya Sai Baba", and also videos of him doing magic tricks with jewelry to his deranged cult following, which he claimed he had the power to create out of thin air.
I only recently discovered this, and I don't know how these deranged lunatic cult freaks were able to rise to the top of the Chavismo movement, but the fact that they did explains everything that happened in the past year and after Chavez' passing.
Maduro is in on it. The kidnapping is fake. There was no kidnapping. The entire thing was a propaganda spectacle planned in advance with the top of the Venezuelan regime. That is why there was no resistance at all and the Israeli-US empire was able to sell it as an epic based power move.
Maduro's son is now using clips of his father and his account with a prison photo using the same slogan the Delcy regime is using to justify the total rape of Venezuela, "Venezuela is reborn", stealing all its oil and handing it over to the genocidal Zionist Jewish supremacist Kushner-Witkoff empire.
Maduro's son is also a converted Zionist himself, already saying in the days after the fake kidnapping spectacle that Venezuela should re-establish relations with Israel, and he's since been a key player in spreading Zionist evangelical Christianity to indoctrinate Venezuelans into the death-cult's Jewish supremacist ideology (the Venezuelan puppet regime now routinely promotes Zionist Christians from the US and Israel).
Now here's the problem for the standard narrative about a fake kidnapping operation that showed just how epic and based and powerful the Kushner/Witkoff empire is: Maduro is still alive. He's not dead. He is fully capable of giving public statements. He can disavow everything that is happening now. Yet he hasn't done that. In fact, his son and the rest of the Delcy puppet regime are so confident that he won't do it, that they use clips of him and his own account and photos of him in prison that miraculously they have access to, to gleefully launder their permanent enslavement to the Kushner/Witkoff empire.
What was Maduro doing in the months leading up to that bullshit spectacle "kidnapping" hoax?
He was openly dancing out in the streets, in public, on stages.
After there had been multiple assassination attempts on him when he was out in public doing the same thing, most famously the drone strike attempt.
Why was he so confidently dancing and doing the wrestler heel act without any worry in the world as the US moved its navy close to Venezuela and threatened to bomb and destroy it and kill him?
Because he was playing his part. It was all fake. It was a hoax.
The "deal" he proposed to the US months before that hoax kidnapping had been accepted, but the Kushner/Witkoff Trump regime as well as the new puppet regime in Venezuela they were about to enslave needed a story, an alibi, and, most crucially, they needed a propaganda spectacle showcasing the supposedly overwhelming power and superiority of the Kushner/Witkoff empire ahead of the planned Iran war.
So they concocted this entire hoax for that purpose.
If it hadn't been a hoax, Maduro would be dead right now because he would have to be permanently silenced, and other leading members of the Venezuelan government would have been eliminated too.
Notice how there was no fake bullshit "kidnapping" of Khamenei. They murdered him, because there is no such thing as an epic based 100 dimensional chess operation of flying helicopters over Caracas and evading all military counter-reaction and magically being able to kidnap a president without incurring a single loss or even a single bullet fired in your direction. That's not real. You would have to be a fucking moron to think that's real, in other words, the entire US-Western media and political class.
Instead, all you had was a fake kidnapping of him and of course also his wife because he can't be left alone while they're doing a fake bullshit trial before they release him either at the end of his term or sometime after.
The only real aspect of it was the Cuban personal guards being mass murdered, but this was likely not done by the US, this was done by the Venezuelan puppet regime itself. They betrayed them. They turned on them and murdered them as they did not suspect it with a bullet to the head. I'm sure the Cubans know this but have not said it yet publicly, but sooner or later it will come out what those depraved degenerate scum did.
@jojjeols@Reuters@DominoTheoryMag I am sure not even you dumbfuck nigga belives that concentration camps shit in https://t.co/MeE1jQwhgY least invent something new already,that narative was trendy in like 2018