Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
Those “peasants” are going to weather a tariff war far better than the “peasants” in the United States who are not used to the hardship and scarcity that will result.
I’m not sure of this, Chinese system has quirks, like subway stations in the middle of nowhere or, say, USSR-like shortages in some places as opposed to abundance in others. In case of all-out mercantilism boogaloo we might see people’s well-being drop harder than expected in many places, and such a quirk might hit worse than “not being used to hardship and scarcity”.
After all, having enough to eat is not just matter of habit.
Those subway stations in the middle of nowhere that were being touted a while back now are surrounded by bustling cities. Planned infrastructure takes time to fill, but it works much better than suburban sprawl
It is also safer to do subway tunneling works without worrying about the buildings around you.
Examples please. Specific ones.
“Better” is always tied to a specific criterion, there’s nothing absolutely better than something else.
Sure, give me an example since you are the one who claimed it, and I’ll do the legwork for you on what it is today.
Chima has sociaIism. Their people will be fine. The murican people will be left to fend for themselves/starve or become sIaves in the newly expanded guantanarno bay prison.
This word doesn’t mean anything. It was what they call “meme” today in the late XIX century, and then a political-religious term.
China has a bureaucratic, one can say imperial, system with laissez-faire economy, except for the moments when the empire has a project.
USA has an economy less free in fact due to oligopolies, monopolies and use of lobbying instead of competition, but a freer political system.
Not quite. China is far from being a socialist society.
Norway is more socialist than China
The governments of both the USA and China can fuck themselves.
China is far from perfect but they don’t leave their people to die in the streets.
We have been sanctioning Russia for decades to no avail, similar situation.
This is not true. There have been plenty of surface, symbolic sanctions, some on those with no power to overcome them and some on those with power, but not enough for them to notice - even if they lose atrocious amounts of money, they have a country and feel themselves kinds.
That wasn’t a blockade or a siege, and if it were, then again those to suffer would not be anyone with decision-making power.
We cut them out of the SWIFT payment system. All our economists were saying they wouldn’t last more than a few months. That was four years ago.
SWIFT is not the only way to exchange money. The actual power doesn’t suffer from it being cut off. I do. And also from problems with card payments in the interwebs where MC or Visa is expected.
Also I don’t think you realize how much money the Russian gang had in the open and hidden, one can basically say their credit is infinite. Other than trading national resources, they can, unlike American governments, cut local businesses and entities like lifestock to get more. They can do drugs trade, with their size it doesn’t bear any consequences at all, Russian (and Azeri, and Israeli, and which not) embassies have been caught with smuggling industrial amounts of heroine all over the world, nothing followed after those cases. They can just catch people on the streets and sell them for organs and they do. They can extort. They can confiscate. They can enslave.
They are inefficient, for gangsters they are cowards, for mafia they are dishonorable, for cutthroats they are weak, for fanatics they are dirty, for thieves they are tainted. Nobody respects them. But that doesn’t matter when you have such a shitload of resources.
They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of people in the last few years just for fun, to come to the same idea of war that has been found in Syria and in Latin America and in African conflicts without such a process. No way they are this stupid, but they wanted to feel this kind of power because there are not many things for them to want anymore. And also to kill brave people.
“Inefficiencies of central planning”. It’s wasteful and kind of amusing but at least they got something done and may even have a city coming next
For new development, It is easier to build subway first and then build around it or build concurrently at the same time but the trains/busses and road need to work before people will occupy the buildings there. It is common practice for new development.
In some countries like Singapore that is how it is done for new development because most people don’t drive in Singapore, they don’t even own cars. Public transport like buses and subway/mrt need to start operating in those new areas before people move in. People need to be able to get to their home and offices by bus or train, if not no one will move in to their new homes except for the few with cars. Other countries with high car ownership they just need roads to be operational so they might not understand this.
If something can be unintentionally wasteful, there are fewer steps to make it intentionally wasteful, and it’s not just theft and loss of efficiency, but way to build up power to do more of the same. Which eventually corrupts a society fully. Which is what has happened to the USSR.
Well, this is happening to all of the world now, so nothing specific for planned economies.
Maybe USSR actually did the heroic sacrifice of detecting the minefield ahead.
Like with writing programs, some people prefer exceptions somehow handled with try-catch, and some prefer logically complete processes. If a language supports exceptions, you’ll use them if you want to work with other people, but there are benefits to being strict to yourself too. Same with the USSR - it failed encountering a problem, but that other big powers didn’t fail right then doesn’t mean they didn’t encounter the same problem or did process it correctly.