Posts Tagged ‘Communism’

China’s Roving Death Vans

Sunday, March 3rd, 2024

The more we find out about Communist China, the more there is to loath, despite all the globalist happy talk about a “flat” world where we could export manufacturing to China for lower costs without any negative consequence. Today’s example: A government propaganda video bragging about their mobile death vans.

  • “This is one of those times where I wish genuinely that I hadn’t found something. I just discovered something absolutely horrid.”
  • “These cars just show up and execute you.”
  • They used to have public executions in arenas. They haven’t done away with that (or shooting you on the side of the road and burying you in a ditch), but the death vans are considered more “efficient.”
  • “How [the government video] is framed, it’s like how would you be executed, this is going to happen to you. You’re supposed to enter this POV, this is from your perspective, how are you going to be taken out by the government?”
  • They make a point of how much more humane lethal injection is. “Look how nice we are!”
  • They talk about how much cheaper a mobile execution van is than a fixed execution center. “This is really good! It’s a cost-saving method when we need to go murder all those people!”
  • “China, even per capita, executes more people every year than every single country combined. And that’s just the people that they count…every year, China is executing thousands and thousands of people.”
  • One estimate has 8,000 people per year executed in China. (And that’s just the ones we have some evidence for. “Some people just get disappeared.”) By contrast, there were 18 death row inmates executed in the U.S. in 2022.
  • “It’s really grim and also very dystopian, the fact that when you’re strapped down and laying there, you’re looking up at the Communist Party of China’s insignia and right above that is a security camera.”
  • Remember: China has nothing like our legal system or the rule of law. They have a 99.9% conviction rate.
  • There’s a long list of crimes you can receive the death penalty for, including owning a gun or using a VPN. “If somebody wants you gone, you could get the death penalty for really anything.”
  • And the government video talks about the process of the lethal injection shutting down your organs.
  • Matthew Tye, the covering the video, lived in China for a decade. This is “how human life is treated on a political level in China…I think this gives you a perspective on how hard Chinese citizens have it.”

    China’s Abandoned Levittown McMansions

    Thursday, February 22nd, 2024

    Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: All the homes were theoretically designed for rich people, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why they would want them.

  • More than 100 uncompleted McMansions sit in Shenyang City some 400 miles northeast of Beijing.
  • They were “built by Greenland Group, one of the more than 50 housing developers that have defaulted on their debt in recent years.”
  • “Construction in 2010 but came to a halt a few years later.”
  • I know that China is a very different country indeed, but I can’t figure out why the developers thought that these McMasions, all made on the same floorplan and jowl by jowl next to each other on pretty small plots of land, would be appealing to the wealthy in the first place. They houses themselves are big and stylish enough in the 19th century French style they were aping, but the rich want land, space and differentiation, not to live between two houses exactly like their own on a small plot of land.

    Yet another example of China’s inexplicable, wasteful policies…

    Worldcon And Team Boot

    Sunday, February 18th, 2024

    Evidently some members of the science fiction community are shocked, shocked that Hugo nominees at last year’s Worldcon in communist China were excluded from the ballot despite having enough votes to get on it because they might offend the CCP.

    Really? Which part of “communist China” was unclear to you?

    The real people to blame are the Worldcon members who voted to hold a Worldcon in a communist country that routinely rapes and tortures ethnic minorities as a matter of policy to keep them in line. Communist China’s numerous trespasses against international human rights agreements and common decency alike have been known for decades, yet Worldcon voters took a look at China’s Worldcon bid and went “Nah, it’ll be fine!”

    I’m not even mildly surprised at this outcome. Worldcon and most of science fiction’s institutions already showed that they had been corrupted and infected with social justice during the Sad Puppies incident. After that, I decided that neither Worldcon nor the Hugos were worth my time, money or attention. (And keep in mind that I had had collected literally every Hugo winning novel in first edition hardback up to that time.)

    The commie Hugo kerfuffle didn’t cause me to lose respect for the Hugos or Worldcon because I had already lost all respect for both.

    In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

    By choosing to hold a Worldcon in communist China, Worldcon voters declared loudly, for all to hear, that they were firmly on Team Boot.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    China’s Fake Log Princesses

    Thursday, February 15th, 2024

    Some of the Chinese news/videos because they’re important. But this story I’m putting up because it’s so ridiculous.

    There’s evidently a genre of China’s video of pretty women in rural China carrying massive logs.

    I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to find out there aren’t really lots of attractive women in rural China wearing makeup and carrying heavy logs around. Naturally, the logs are hollow or made of balsa. Naturally, they’re scamming poor simps (including some in the west) out of sympathy money.

    The one the girls struggling through the mud in her old fashioned revolutionary clothing is particularly risible.

    I wonder what American internet fads are inexplicable to the Chinese. Maybe they’re completely baffled by Hammurabi memes or Rickrolls…

    Thanks for the Memeories…

    Zeihan on Evergrande: 1.5 BILLION Unsold Condos?

    Tuesday, February 6th, 2024

    I haven’t been updating every twist and turn of the Evergrande collapse, but we’re going to look at it again because this Peter Zeihan video has a fairly staggering statistic. He asserts that there are 1.5 BILLION (with a B) unoccupied housing units in China. Even though we already knew about the ghost cities, that’s like an entire ghost nation for a China that was already headed down the economic crapper.

  • “A Hong Kong court has ruled that China’s largest property development group, Evergrande, is bankrupt and needs to be broken up. This is something that the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort on the last two years not happening.”
  • “There’s two big things that dominate the Chinese economy. The first is something I call hyperfinancialization: The idea that the government both de facto confiscates the savings of the citizen population so it can only go into projects funded by Chinese State Banks, as well as massively expanding the money supply to a tune of like almost triple what we have here in the United States.”
  • “It’s a public stability political control approach to finance. It’s not about profit, it’s about throughput, because throughput requires a lot of bodies.”
  • “Number one, you get companies like Evergrande, who gorge on all this bottomless supply of debt to build build, build, build, build, even if there’s no demand.”
  • “Second, you get a population who knows that their private savings is almost worthless, because the Chinese government is forcing them to keep it in the state banks, and they want to put it into a hard asset that preferably the state can’t control. And if they can’t get their money out of the country, then the next best thing is a hard asset in the country, which typically is property.”
  • “You have somewhere probably in the vicinity of 1.5 billion units in the country that have never been lived in, never will be lived in. So you’re talking about 100% overbuild, conservatively. Some estimates say it’s as high as three billion, which is just so far beyond stupid.”
  • This is such a huge number that I’m having trouble believing it. After all, 1.5 billion is more than at least once current estimate for the current total number of houses in Asia. Is there supporting evidence? Well, I found this.

    “How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau.

    “That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.

    That’s people, not homes. Still, even if you cut it in half, to 750 million vacant condos, that’s a huge number. That’s the equivalent of 30 empty Shanghais.

    Back to Zeihan:

  • “Evergrande going down means that their debts aren’t going to be serviced anymore, and the physical assets they have are going to be parceled up and foreign investors are going to be coming in seeing what bits that they can get.” Any foreigners investing in Chinese real estate need their heads examined.
  • “These things are things that the Chinese Communist Party would not normally allow to happen, so there’s a couple ways that this can go, none of them are good.”
  • “Option number one is we follow a western style bankruptcy and restitution program where this system is broken up and a lot of their assets are sold at pennies, maybe dimes, on a dollar.”
  • “You can count on private citizens being up in arms. I mean, the best estimate I’ve seen out of China is at 70% of total private savings is wrapped up in real estate, and most of these assets are worth no more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
  • “You have a fire sale of the single largest player which controls one sixth of the market, holy shit, things are going to get real very, very, very quickly.”
  • “Option number two is that the Chinese step in and abrogate the Hong Kong ruling. Now legally this cannot happen, but the Chinese Communist party is not really big on legal details when it comes to Hong Kong in particular.”
  • “Then Evergrande goes on some sort of state drip and everything with the system just kind of limps on, with the understanding now that Hong Kong has no legal authority over its own holdings, which will start an exodus of what few international firms are still there.”
  • “Regardless how this goes, don’t expect anything in the market to get better.”
  • “Evergrande may be the biggest player in this market, but it is by far not the only one who’s been doing stupid things like this, building condos that have no demand or running it like a Ponzi scheme. Every development company in the country basically operates this this way, and the second and third largest players in the industry are state-owned.”
  • “Even if all of a sudden this place were run by a bunch of Austrian economists, it’s too late.” Because of the one-child policy, there simply aren’t enough people of home-buying age.”
  • “I don’t want to say anything overly dramatic as ‘This is where it all starts to fall apart,’ because we’ve had a lot of things like that go down in the last 18 months. But this cuts to the core of what enables the average [Chinese] citizen to actually support the government, and there’s no way we move forward from this without a lot of side damage.”
  • The Chinese economy is already sucking. If the housing oversupply is really as bad as Zeihan makes out, China is in for an economic upheaval that makes 1929 look like a mild case of the hiccups.

    Chinese Commies PianoGate: One Of Them Was A Spy

    Wednesday, January 31st, 2024

    This story just gets weirder and weirder.

    The Chinese commies freak out at being filmed story (and the follow-up) has a new twist that makes that helps explain the freakout: One of them was a known spy.

  • “Christine Lee she was named by the MI5 back in 2022 as an agent of influence…British Security Service issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in political interference activities for the Chinese state.”
  • This marked a shift in approach “being taken against the security threat posed by China.”
  • “She has personally met with Xi Jinping back in Beijing.”
  • “This is a bunch of people in a conference room. This is called the political consultative conference. They invite a bunch of people living overseas back to China to get greeted by Xi Jinping for to thank them for their effort in conducting influence operations overseas.”
  • “It’s also possible that CH Lee doubles as somebody from one of the intelligence bureaus.”
  • “On the surface she’s a lawyer in the UK, and she is also a political influence campaign, specialist and also she could also be a secret agent doing something even worse.”
  • “The entire thing started because Christine Lee did not want her face to appear on camera, but she was not able to go up directly to confront Dr K [Brendan Kavanagh], being that she’s publicly known by the MI5 as an agent of influence.”
  • “I think Dr K needs to be aware that this was not just against a series of random CCP nationalists, he’s actually against a systematically planned out series of influence operations. And this, in my view,escalates the situation entirely. I think he should do something to protect himself, protect his family, and also be aware of who he dealing with. This is not a regular group of people.”
  • Meanwhile, the Chinese communists are threatening to sue Kavanagh for “defamation.”

    The story started out looking like it was just “Little Pinks” acting like assholes in another country, but the truth appears to be stranger and more sinister.

    Follow-Up: Chinese Commies Can’t Chain Our Pianos

    Saturday, January 27th, 2024

    In a followup to this post, I am happy to report that the St. Pancras station piano has now been freed from Chinese commie oppression.

    And pianist Brendan Kavanagh had a few things to say about the CCP:

  • He displays a Winnie the Pooh doll and picture because “Pooh has been banned by the CCP as being subversive, and apparently if you have Winnie the Pooh, your videos won’t be shown in the Chinese Mainland. This shows the power of the arts to undermine authoritarianism.”
  • The original video has “taken particularly off in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and anyone who suffered from oppression.”
  • “We all know who [the oppressors] are: They are living Western lifestyles, but having a Communist authoritarian ideology.”
  • “This piano has become a CCP free zone. Yesterday, there was people from Hong Kong here. God bless Hong Kong, glory be to Hong Kong, and the people who put on the Hong Kong video. Their YouTube channel was immediately deleted.”
  • “I completely support the arts to undermine authoritarianism.”
  • “Winnie the Pooh has the ability to undermine authoritarian cultures. It’s not just political activism it’s actually the arts which they are afraid of.
  • “XiXi is frightened of Winnie, can you believe it? The Red Army is frightened of Winnie the Pooh because what they were doing they were comparing XiXi to Winnie. They said he looked a bit similar. XiXi’s feelings were hurt, and so he banned Winnie the Pooh completely from mainland China. So Winnie the Pooh has also become a symbol of free artistic expression in the face of unjust authoritarians.”
  • “It it was the Streisand Effect effects par excellence, this video.”
  • “I totally support Taiwan, and I totally support artistic expression.”
  • “The little pinks tried to shut us down they failed miserably.”
  • “This piano has become a CCP little pink free zone! God bless you all, thank you for supporting the video!”
  • A tiny, technical correction: The Communist Chinese are totalitarians rather than authoritarians, as they seek to control every aspect of life, not just rule an existing social structure. See Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s Dictatorships and Double Standards.

    (Hat tip: Reader Malthus.)

    Chinese Commies Think They Own British Public Spaces

    Wednesday, January 24th, 2024

    And sometimes I post something just because it makes my blood boil. Such is the case with these Communist Chinese tourists traveling in the UK who think they have a right to tell others what they can and can’t do in public spaces.

    Pianist and YouTuber Brendan Kavanagh is livestreaming himself playing in the London St. Pancreas Pancras tube station on a piano specifically given to the station by Elton John to promote live impromptu performances for the public, when Communist Chinese tourists imperiously demand he stop filming because they don’t want to be on camera.

    Does any other nation’s tourists act with such entitlement toward the citizens of the country they’re traveling through? (Maybe French Parisians.)

    But wait! It gets worse! UK police, rather than telling the Communist Chinese to suck lemons, have now cordoned off the piano with two guards to prevent the piano from being played. Because evidently the precious feels of Chinese Communist tourists trump the rights of the British public.

    “You can’t make this stuff up.”

    “Let’s keep ourselves able to play to make free music in the free world.”

    Inexplicable.

    Putin Wants Alaska Back. Also, People In Hell Want Icewater

    Monday, January 22nd, 2024

    “I’ll take Absurd News for $200.”

    Russia laid the groundwork for expanding its soft power across North America and Asia with a new executive order signed by Vladimir Putin last week.

    The new order provides funds for the search, registration and legal protection of Russian properties abroad, including land and buildings located on the territory of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

    Among the areas affected by the new decree is Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 and still has communities with close ties to Russia.

    Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and large parts of Asia were once part of the former empire.

    However, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) notes that “it is not clear what Russia’s current or historical assets consist of.”

    This first of what promises to be multiple Nelsons

    You may remember that America bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867.

    A second Nelson, because one simply wasn’t enough.

    Evidently Putin’s continuing inability to conquer Ukraine, a former vassal state laying right next door, wasn’t enough of a humiliation for him, and he needs to pretend he can go toe-to-toe with the world’s only hyperpower to reclaim the 49th state over a century-and-and half old case of buyer’s seller’s remorse.

    Another Nelson, just because.

    Let’s, for the moment, set aside the distinct possibility that this declaration of suzerainty over former Soviet states not only implicitly threatens the Baltic Nations, but also Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

    Basically, all the Stans.

    Still, the “just wants to watch the world burn” part of me wants to see Pooty-Poot’s Russia try to conquer Alaska, if only because the American reaction to whatever half-assed misexpedition across the Bearing Strait Russia is able to launch might result in the complete seizure of the Kuril-Aleut oil fields in far eastern Siberia. Indeed, I imagine that it wouldn’t even be a week before American air power completely wrecked the fragile Transiberian Railway and Highway, making Russian forces in the far east completely SOL. At that point, an American air and sea bridge from Alaska would still provide more reliable logistical support than Russia’s long, primitive and fragile Transiberian transport network.

    One wonders what purpose these vainglorious, unenforceable pronouncements are meant to serve. It’s like an eight year old building a pillow fort in the middle of the living, loudly proclaiming “Better not come in here! It’s my fort!” Only for his mother to ignore it and pick up the couch cushions because The Price Is Right is on.

    Maybe no other reason than puffing up Putin’s fragile ego.

    Perhaps Putin should limit himself to one unwinnable “Special Military Operation”” at a time…

    A final Nelson. For emphasis.

    How Corruption Hollowed Out China’s Military

    Wednesday, January 10th, 2024

    When Russia launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine in 2022, many Russian units were shocked by how badly supplied and equipped they were, with Putin cronies supplying expired food and lots of spare parts and equipment seemingly stolen or sold off. Dictatorships lack checks and balances, and without them, corruption tends to become endemic.

    Now news has come to light that the same thing appear to have happened in China.

    US intelligence indicates that President Xi Jinping’s sweeping military purge came after it emerged that widespread corruption undermined his efforts to modernize the armed forces and raised questions about China’s ability to fight a war, according to people familiar with the assessments.

    The corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence.

    The US assessments cited several examples of the impact of graft, including missiles filled with water instead of fuel and vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively, one of the people said.

    I’ve got to say, trying to get away with graft in your nation’s nuclear forces is a pretty bold move. On the other hand, if China ever tried to use them, there’s such a high chance all military leadership would be incinerated by America’s much better equipped and maintained nuclear forces, so maybe they figured they’d never be held to account.

    The US assesses that corruption within the People’s Liberation Army has led to an erosion of confidence in its overall capabilities, particularly when it comes to the Rocket Force, and also set back some of Xi’s top modernization priorities, the people said. The graft probe has ensnared more than a dozen senior defense officials over the past six months, in what may be China’s largest crackdown on the country’s military in modern history.

    One wonders what other areas of China’s military capabilities have been degraded thanks to corner-cutting and corruption. Looking at the rest of China: Maybe all of it?

    All this leads me to a pretty on-point Habitual Linecrosser:

    I’ve wrote about how the Pakistani ISI were backing the Taliban for over a decade, for all the good it did…