China Economy: News & Discussion

RoaringTigerHiddenDragon

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Looks like Dongguan has a real estate problem - plenty of empty spaces. Maybe the people in Dongguan slums can move in here.

 

johnq

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China Law Professor SILENCED After Mentioning Organ Harvesting
Chinese criminal law professor Luo Xiang had his account on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, completely wiped after he talked about people being "raised like animals" and warning of the dangers of "social Darwinism." What he was talking about was organ harvesting, a subject that is so sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party, they will go to great lengths silence those who talk about it. 6 Things That Show China's Organ Harvesting Is Real https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLFMi...
 

RoaringTigerHiddenDragon

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Why are there no birds in China? i am telling you between the Yulin dog festival (as a dog owner this just makes me vomit) and the disgusting habit in this video below, Chinese are just raised to be filthy animals with no morality whatsoever. No wonder humanity wiping viruses keep originating from there all the time.

 

rockdog

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For people who think that China is progressing and is worthy of emulating, this video should be an eye opener.

i have never seen anyone in India face this much amount of despair and hardship.

At present India's per capita income is only a fifth of China's per capita income. China's nominal GDP per capita was $9,580 and India's nominal GDP per capita was $2,038 in 2018. So, China's GDP per capita was 4.7 times higher than India's in 2018.


I feel very sad both nation started at same level during 1980s ... Now we are not in the same league.

I hope India economy would recovery to catch up Bangaladesh in coming yrs.
 

rockdog

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Absolutely you should learn from India. The $8+ billion debt we deploy for the MAHSR line is at 0.5% interest with repayment spread over 50 years with a 15 year repayment moratorium. This means our one way ticket prices for a distance of 510 km is just $50 making the whole project eminently feasible. Not to mention we will be deploying the zero accident, state-of-the-art Shinkansen technology with Indian engineers being trained to run the system with Japanese efficiency. The JICA deal terms are extremely favorable for the line’s feasibility.

Plus let’s not forget india has its own capability to make and deploy HSR train sets - couple of them are already running though at reduced speeds due to track limitations and traffic.
Sorry i don't think we are talking about the same thing. Put the common train aside, China has 200-250km/H train system as bullet train (动车), and 250-350km/H system as HSR (高铁).

I checked the data, China has 36,000KM HSR, by this standard India has 0 inch running.

45eg.jpg


123.jpg


If we talk and compare about ROI between something, we'd better compare the same thing. You didn't find my sarcasm from last post, my bad.
 

rockdog

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CCP’s strategy to use HSR as an alternative to flying so they don’t have to rely on “western” Airbus and Boeing planes is amusing. Chinese HSR is running at massive losses and many new lines have been canceled. The debt is getting worse.
Recent article from Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Giant Pandas and the Infrastructure Bill | Opinion


s I watched the long, stale vaudeville-like performance over the infrastructure bill, I kept noticing the amazing steady progress of the Chinese Communist Party as it continued to build.

While we debate, impeach and campaign for office, they build. The contrast between Chinese progress and American paralysis has been growing greater and greater. And it's a serious problem.

As someone who loves the natural world—and has always loved the giant panda—I was delighted to discover that in the middle of our infrastructure babble, the Chinese had opened the huge, ultra-modern Chengdu Tianfu Airport. Chengdu is the headquarters for all activities involving the giant panda in China. It is famous to nature lovers everywhere.

Chinese domestic airlines have been growing steadily. Callista and I have been on several flights around China. The airports are always clean, the flight attendants are always professional and each new terminal is more and more modern.

In developing the brand-new airport in Chengdu, the Chinese included facial recognition software, self-check-in kiosks (so you can go straight through to your plane), smart security systems, self-boarding gates and even experimental airport robot staff (although, with 1.4 billion people, it is unlikely China will run short of people to staff an airport).

The Chinese Communist Party has had a massive interest in expanding China's domestic transportation infrastructure. The party knew it wanted high-speed trains to draw as many people as possible out of airplanes. Although, given the population, it is simply impossible to build a big enough aviation system.

Today, there are 37,900 kilometers of high-speed railways in China, with the fastest going more than 210 miles per hour. To get American politicians, interest groups, lobbyists, unions and bureaucrats to realize they had better get their national goals together—just for our survival as a country—they ought to all go ride a Chinese high-speed train and then come home and ride the Amtrak Acela, which peaks at 150 miles per hour. Then, they should compare comfort, cleanliness, convenience and service on the Chinese and American systems.

Newsweek subscription offers >
Domestic travel in China jumped 6.8 percent from April 2019 to April 2020. In part because of the impact of COVID-19, the Guangzhou-Baiyun airport replaced Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (which I had represented for 20 years) as the busiest airport in the world.

After pouring $10.8 billion into the new Chengdu Tianfu Airport, Chinese ambitions are accelerating—not shrinking. The current plans are by 2035 to add another 159 airports to the 241 that already exist.

Now, no one should read this as my endorsement of China's totalitarian system – or as any sort of pro-China propaganda. This is my warning that America must compete or lose.

If not for the partisan pork-barrel infighting and pettiness of the current American system, how many airports would you bet we could build by 2035? How many high-speed rails? Anyone who thinks we are going to compete with China without major domestic reform is simply delusional.

Of course, like my granddaughter, you can always have a stuffed panda to hold while we slide into the past.
 

RoaringTigerHiddenDragon

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Anything above 200kmph is HSR. That is the universal definition. We already have T18 train sets running - these are capable of clocking 200kmph. So they are “Bullet trains” already, by your definition. What india would do is shift freight traffic to DFC which is nearing completion, and then decongest the existing passenger tracks and then you will see that in several sections these trains would run at their design speed - 200kmph or as HSR. i thought you follow Indian news. Are you capable of understanding what is happening or not?

I am NOT impressed by China has this or that. You just have done it before we have. That’s all. HSR technology is 1960s and it is just a question of money and time to get it done. We will be there in a few years.

Your China this or China that is a childish argument. The US had skyscrapers and expressways in the 1930s, when in China people were in opium dens and getting massacred by the Japanese in Nanking. I can post a comparison of China versus US in the 1930s here. Just because you have caught up to the US after 90 years in skyscrapers and roads does not mean anything. The Americans are not going to gloat over that.

Chinese have low IQ and lack maturity and unable to understand how a country develops. Countries don’t develop to attain some statistics race. They develop in their own timeline with the overall goal of improving their citizens’ lives. India is marching toward that 110%. Our goal is to meet SDGs by 2030 and not HSR km targets which only a corrupt organization like the CCP which doesn’t care about its citizens spout as something of an achievement. India follows the Japanese model of development and not the stupid dystopian, dysfunctional, tofu Chinese model of low quality, low human rights development.

This is the problem with brainwashed CCP wumaos - they think that everything is a race. No one gives a damn if China has built a billion kms of HSR when the standard of sanitation, water quality, human rights, overall quality of life, religious freedom is extremely low. People are not going to trade riding in a HSR for their religious freedom and ability to decide their fate for themselves.

I understood your sarcasm which you decided to use without realizing that India actually has a much better deal on the HSR than the high interest financed Chinese HSR tracks which are 95% loss making and have led to massive bad debts. India’s HSR will make money from day 1 due to the very good model of financing, low maintenance and operating cost Japanese technology. The Chinese HSR is very high maintenance gulping up a lot of costs and increasing debts to bankruptcy levels.

Here is a quote from a report:

”Other lines, such as Lanzhou-Xinjiang route – which only operates eight daily services, despite being designed to handle 320 trains a day – are struggling to meet their electricity costs. The reality is that such lines are in danger of becoming white elephants.”

The CCP and the Wumao bootlickers will never understand such civilizational aspects. And just spout statistical nonsense as if the world is impressed by these statistics. You can see this in the mass exodus of HongKongers. They have access to a reasonably high quality of life and once the transnational criminal organization aka the CCP cracked down the ones that can leave all left. HK‘s status as an international finance center has been destroyed and the city is getting poorer by the day due to the stupid ways of the CCP criminals’ thinking. Lol.
 

rockdog

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Anything above 200kmph is HSR. That is the universal definition. We already have T18 train sets running - these are capable of clocking 200kmph. So they are “Bullet trains” already, by your definition. What india would do is shift freight traffic to DFC which is nearing completion, and then decongest the existing passenger tracks and then you will see that in several sections these trains would run at their design speed - 200kmph or as HSR. i thought you follow Indian news. Are you capable of understanding what is happening or not?

I am NOT impressed by China has this or that. You just have done it before we have. That’s all. HSR technology is 1960s and it is just a question of money and time to get it done. We will be there in a few years.

Your China this or China that is a childish argument. The US had skyscrapers and expressways in the 1930s, when in China people were in opium dens and getting massacred by the Japanese in Nanking. I can post a comparison of China versus US in the 1930s here. Just because you have caught up to the US after 90 years in skyscrapers and roads does not mean anything. The Americans are not going to gloat over that.

Chinese have low IQ and lack maturity and unable to understand how a country develops. Countries don’t develop to attain some statistics race. They develop in their own timeline with the overall goal of improving their citizens’ lives. India is marching toward that 110%. Our goal is to meet SDGs by 2030 and not HSR km targets which only a corrupt organization like the CCP which doesn’t care about its citizens spout as something of an achievement. India follows the Japanese model of development and not the stupid dystopian, dysfunctional, tofu Chinese model of low quality, low human rights development.

This is the problem with brainwashed CCP wumaos - they think that everything is a race. No one gives a damn if China has built a billion kms of HSR when the standard of sanitation, water quality, human rights, overall quality of life, religious freedom is extremely low. People are not going to trade riding in a HSR for their religious freedom and ability to decide their fate for themselves.

I understood your sarcasm which you decided to use without realizing that India actually has a much better deal on the HSR than the high interest financed Chinese HSR tracks which are 95% loss making and have led to massive bad debts. India’s HSR will make money from day 1 due to the very good model of financing, low maintenance and operating cost Japanese technology. The Chinese HSR is very high maintenance gulping up a lot of costs and increasing debts to bankruptcy levels.

Here is a quote from a report:

”Other lines, such as Lanzhou-Xinjiang route – which only operates eight daily services, despite being designed to handle 320 trains a day – are struggling to meet their electricity costs. The reality is that such lines are in danger of becoming white elephants.”

The CCP and the Wumao bootlickers will never understand such civilizational aspects. And just spout statistical nonsense as if the world is impressed by these statistics. You can see this in the mass exodus of HongKongers. They have access to a reasonably high quality of life and once the transnational criminal organization aka the CCP cracked down the ones that can leave all left. HK‘s status as an international finance center has been destroyed and the city is getting poorer by the day due to the stupid ways of the CCP criminals’ thinking. Lol.
Sorry my reply lead your emotional rant with off topic stuff, i thoguht your reply was stick to the railway related.

Here comes my points:

1. If you talking China's debt on HSR system by your standard, you shouldn't only quote the debt on Chinese HSR system, it refer to system with 250-350km/H. By your stadard, you should invole both train system with 200-250km/H train system as bullet train (动车), and 250-350km/H system as HSR (高铁); from this point, the ROI and debt level is acceptable.

2. The investment logics betwen "200-250km/H train system" and "250-350km train system" are different. In China, we upgard the current common rail network to reach "200-250km/H train system", which means the investment is quite low. But for 250-350km/H networks, we built from scratch. So your example on India so called "high speed train" is not proper to our 250-350km/H networks. We don't need to learn from your financial plan...

3. From marco view about national HSR system, the strategic benefit is more important than financial:
a. importing less planes from Boeing and Airbus
b. integrate west, middle, east part of China, with faster people/cargo transportation system.
c. Since 95% parts of Chinese HSR are indigenous, those money circulating in our own economy.
d. East part HSR is profitble now, Middle part HSR is break even, West HSR is lossing money, but the government treat it as strategic loss (like Xinjiang-Lanzhou HSR), we care more integration with remote area than money making.

4. Heard your first real HSR from Mumbai to Ahmedabad is already delayed, how much time cost and other cost wasted and would you suggest the ROI and debt on this project to me? I wanna learn, thanks.
 

johnq

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The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
 

Wisemarko

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Incredible speed of Chinese renewable energy push. They overtook USA in 2012 and far surpassed everyone in next 9 years.

961A7369-1952-446F-B2F4-E2D50CB42E5F.jpeg
 

vampyrbladez

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India was, is and will be nowhere in the world


After the Narendra Modi-led government’s grave failure to combat the explosive second wave of Covid-19, this wave exacerbated by the Delta variant, Western media, think tanks and academia have shifted their attention to India again.


Earlier, the West projected India as a critical partner of the US to contain China’s economic and strategic clout.


That focus gained adherence after India and the US signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement in August 2016, and both countries inked the subsequent foundational agreements. US President Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, termed US strategy the “planned partnership for the entire 21st century.”


But now, in stark contrast, India is being dismissed in the Western world as an ineligible partner for the Western world to contain China. The Western refocus on India now in the West is the realization of Western strategists that they made a mistake to project India as a global player. They started to recognize that India has power and strategic illusion. But they made an error , misjudging India’s proper position.


Last October 20, I wrote an article in Asia Times entitled, “India is nowhere in the world, denial won’t work.” More than a thousand Indians from India and the Indian diaspora sent me insulting and abusive emails. I didn’t feel sad about those emails. Rather, they made me laugh, and I felt pity for those who sent them.

Some of my Indian scholarly friends inside and outside India also expressed their discontent with my article. They said they found my characterization of their country over the top.


However, my comments about India were not baseless. While working at the Nepal South Asia Centre, a Kathmandu-based South Asian think tank, I had the opportunity to observe South Asia very closely.


I have a fair understanding of trade, technology, economy, politics, culture, religion, population, democracy, human rights, international relations, diplomacy and the strategies of India and other South Asian countries. I also have had plenty of opportunity to observe the Indian psyche.


I used to tell my Indian friends to wait and see that my perception of India would be proven correct sooner or later.


The pumped-up claims by Indian political leaders, top bureaucrats, diplomats, think tanks, journalists and scholars for their ideas of India’s role on the global stage used to astonish me. I used to believe that they were immersed in a fantasy far away from ground reality.

I now recognize that there is a big difference between the powerful land they have imagined and India’s actual economic and strategic position on the global stage.


In exchanging views with my Indian friends, I had always advised them not to believe the baseless claims made by their cleverer-by-half leaders and babus (top bureaucrats). I kept repeating my assertion: “India is nowhere in the world.” Many Indian friends became furious after hearing me say it.


The miserable failure to combat the coronavirus pandemic has exposed India’s weakness. The West had a misconception that India is growing and can be a global player and instrumental in countering China. However, the epidemic helped the West to dispel its illusion.


Recall a few facts. India, among the South Asian countries, is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, 2020. India even lags behind literally starving countries such as Congo, Ethiopia and Angola.


One in five Indians still earns under US$37.50 a month – and 88.87 percent of the population or, in other words, nine out of ten, still make less than US$ 165 a month in India.

Economic activity in India is limited to a tiny population. Out of a population of 1.36 billion, only 14.6 million people had taxable income in the fiscal year 2018/2019. India’s taxable income is above the figure of US$6,750.


Only 4.6 million Indians earn more than one million Indian rupees, an amount that equals slightly less than US$13,500.


Urban India, known to the West as India, accounts for only about 35 percent of the country’s population. Sixty-five percent of India’s population lives in rural areas. Thus, the countryside of India is very different from what India looks like in the world.


Despite the economic reforms that began in July 1991, India only grew to join merely the $2.5 trillion economies in 2019. In the Lok Sabha election campaign 2019, the Modi government raised the slogan of creating a $5 trillion economy by 2024. But India’s ambition to become a $5 trillion economy is unlikely to be realized even by 2030.


After the Coronavirus outbreak in China in March last year, there was much hype insisting that the caravan of manufacturers from China would rush to India. But there was no basis and reason for international manufacturing companies to relocate to India from China. I wrote in Asia Times last year to explain why manufacturing companies would not relocate to India from China.

Thus, as I want to repeat once again, as always in the past, India was nowhere in the world. India is nowhere in the world now. And India will be nowhere in the world in the distant future.


It does not make sense to falsely claim that India becomes a vishwaguru (world teacher) or global economic power at ordinary times. Certainly there was no possibility that India could show leadership in a crisis.


Indian Prime Minister Modi was seen as a global leader in world politics because of the pro-Western policy of his external affairs minister S. Jaishankar. US President Donald Trump used India as a proxy in his China strategy to give the impression to American voters that he would contain China. Trump had a plan to use Modi to help him be reelected in the November 3, 2020, presidential poll. But he failed unsuccessful. Modi suffered from the delusion that Trump really looked upon him as a global leader.


American strategists are well aware that Indian political leaders and high-ranking government officials have Dionysian personality traits.


American Psychological Anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict says that there are two types of personality traits in human beings. The first is Apollonian, and the second is Dionysian. An Apollonian person does not seek status and doesn’t want a leadership role. Meanwhile, the Dionysian person seeks more status than he/she deserves.


Due to the Dionysian personality traits prevalent among the Indian political leaders who seek more status than they actually command in reality, Indians have come to believe that they can play a role in rebalancing the US and China in the world.


The media coverage of India’s failure to control Covid-19 in the West means a lot to India. First, the West has concluded that India cannot play the role that the West wants India to play.


The West has realized that any miscalculation against China by relying on India would have cost the United States dearly, depending on India. A recently published report in the Financial Times is an example. Those who saw India’s role yesterday seem to become mindful that there’s no role India can play now.


The Biden administration looks like it is now working to reset China’s policy. Recently, the Financial Times quotes US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley as saying, “I think China has a ways to go to develop the actual, no-kidding capability to conduct military operations to seize, through military means, the entire island of Taiwan, if they wanted to do that,” at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.


Similarly, Bernie Sanders, in his most recent article in Foreign Affairs, has called for a change in China policy. Thus, the US wants to alter the China policy.


Even within India, some scholars, responsible journalists and think tanks have concluded that India is nowhere in the world currently and will not be soon. Recently, Kanti Bajpai admitted this fact in his interview with senior Indian journalist Karan Thapar about his recent book India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends.


So what is the actual position of India in the world?


Modi’s India is in the same situation as I said in last year’s Asia Times article. I wrote, “There is a very popular Hindi proverb, “Dhobi ka kutta, na Ghar ka na ghat ka.” A working translation: “A person who is supported nowhere.”


Modi will find no beneficial friends when he needs them in the future by putting all his eggs in the American basket.




Chinese Translation:
Xi sucks running dogs, rockdog.

Perhaps that's why your army got thrashed in Dokhlam?
 

rockdog

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China–Bangladesh strategic linkages


Though China and Bangladesh shared an adversarial relationship during the latter’s independence movement and immediately after that, the relationship has undergone a tremendous transformation to the extent that China is now considered by many in Bangladesh as an ‘all-weather friend’. They established diplomatic ties in 1976; it was defence ties that was an important area of their relationship, which led to further expansion of ties.
Bilateral trade between China and Bangladesh is heavily tilted towards China. The trade deficit between them stood at US $16.27 billion in 2019, which has increased 16-fold in the last two decades. China forms the largest share in Bangladesh’s imports at 31.1 percent in 2019, more than double the imports from the next largest partner. Imports from China include a variety of items from textiles, machines, refined petroleum while exports to China consist mainly of textiles which form 70 percent of the total share.
Fig: Chinese investments and trade in Bangladesh
Development cooperation forms an integral part of the partnership. It was only in recent years that the Chinese investment into Bangladesh has grown exponentially. Total Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) stock has increased at a rate of 10.9 times between the end of 2011 and the end of 2019. Bangladesh received a net FDI of US $1.159 billion in FY19 from China, making it one of the largest recipients in South Asia. The energy sector has been the largest recipient of Chinese investment in recent years. China has implemented a number of projects in the power sector, consisting mostly of coal-based power plants. It has also built the single largest power plant in Bangladesh in a joint venture with Bangladesh, which will bear 30 percent of the total cost. At least 12 dual-fuel power plants are being planned, but so far only three 1,320 megawatt plants are near completion costing around US $ 4.5 billion. China is also investing in the green energy sector with several projects already in the works, including a proposal for a 310 megawatt solar power plant. Bangladesh has also set up a US $400 million joint venture with a Chinese company to build renewable energy projects of a total of 500 megawatts by 2023.
Another important strategic area in the power sector where China is working is the power grid. China is working on a Power Grid Network Strengthening project at an investment of US $1.32 billion and also an expansion and strengthening of the power system network, which is supposed to help in the intelligent operation of the power grid in Bangladesh with an investment of US $ 2.04 billion. Since India declined to be a part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese plans for building an oil pipeline from Bangladesh have not materialised. Despite this, China has a significant strategic presence in Bangladesh. In a deal in 2017, Chinese companies bought three natural gas fields in Bangladesh, which account for more than half of the total gas output of Bangladesh from Chevron. China is also partially financing and helping Bangladesh to build a 220 kilometre pipeline and a single mooring point, which will facilitate direct offloading of imported oil at the Chittagong refinery. It is from this point that the Chinese plan to carry oil to the storage plants in mainland China.

Fig: Chinese investments in Bangladesh till December 2017
Besides the energy sector, infrastructure is one of the sectors where China has made significant investment. One of the most strategically important investments is in the ports of Bangladesh. China is financing and constructing the Payra Deep Sea Port project estimated to cost between US $11 billion and US $15 billion. The port is the third-largest port in the country and had started operating in 2016.
Presently, Chinese firms have been given contracts to construct two components of the project and in a recent letter, Bangladesh sought US $1.6 billion from China to construct the first phase of the seaport. In 2019, Bangladesh gave China access to two of its largest seaports—Chittagong and Mongla. China also signed a deal to develop the Mongla port. China expressed interest and was going to construct a deep sea port at Sonadia but it was later cancelled citing environmental concerns. One major project which has immense strategic implications for India is China’s offer to Bangladesh to manage and restore the Teesta river which flows from India. The plans include building embankments along the river near the Indian border and are estimated to cost US $1 billion, 85 percent of which will be provided by China as a loan. Chinese firms have also shown interest in constructing and operating the Dhaka-Chittagong High-Speed Rail Project. The massive Chinese outreach among other infrastructure projects include the construction of eight Bangladesh-China Friendship bridges, a sewage treatment plant, under river tunnel, economic zones, expansion of Sylhet airport, and various highways and rail links including the flagship Padma Bridge Rail Link Project at an estimated cost of US $ 3.3 billion, 85 percent of which is being funded by China.
China has pushed its way into other sectors of Bangladesh’s economy like the stock market and information technology amongst various others. The Chinese consortium of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchange acquired a 25 percent stake in Bangladesh’s main stock exchange. Its bid was selected over the Indian bid, which was 56 percent less than the Chinese bid. The digital space is an important strategic space where China has invested significantly. Chinese giant, Alipay, obtained a 20 percent stake in bKash, which is the largest mobile financial service provider in Bangladesh. China is also building and financing the sixth largest data centre in Bangladesh and the first tier IV data centre in South Asia. China and Bangladesh have deep collaborative ties in the Information and Communications Technology sector. China has helped develop ‘Info-Sarker’ phase 2, which is a national infra network for the Bangladesh government and is also helping them develop phase 3 of this project by providing US $1 billion. Bangladesh also sought Chinese funds for its ‘Modernisation of Telecommunication Network for Digital Connectivity’ project which seeks to bridge the rural-urban divide in this field. It is in the same project where Chinese giant Huawei seeks to provide 5G technical support.
Fig: Bangladesh arms suppliers shares
Defence cooperation is one of the significant pillars of the relationship between Bangladesh and China. In 2002, they signed the Defence Cooperation Agreement, which also includes defence production, making China the only country with a broad defence cooperation agreement with Bangladesh. China accounted for around 74 percent of Bangladesh’s arms imports between 2010– 2019. Bangladesh also forms 20 percent of China’s total arms imports between 2015–2019. China supplies a wide variety of military equipment from tanks, fighter jets, submarines, frigates, anti-ship missiles to the majority of small arms. China will be training and providing equipment to the Bangladesh military, according to a deal signed in 2014. China is also helping Bangladesh construct and set up its first submarine base, which will house Chinese-built submarines, having a variety of facilities like wharfs, barracks, ammunition depots, and repairing dock.
In recent times, Bangladesh has been doing quite well economically and it has a high growth rate which may propel it to the middle-income country target set by its Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, and has been seeking investments to facilitate this growth. It is here where China comes in, and Beijing has shown a willingness to fund projects which are important to Bangladesh. Some of these projects were rejected by Western financiers due to multiple reasons. China has also consistently shown keen interest in engaging with South Asian countries as it provides a backdoor to the Indian Ocean as well as helps to strategically constrain India, be it by giving 97 percent of Bangladesh’s goods tariff exemption when exported to China or through investments there. Bangladesh has been a buyer of Chinese arms because after its independence its army repatriated Pakistani soldiers who were familiar with the use of Chinese weapons, which led to the high demand for Chinese weapons. It was from here that the defence relationship developed.
One of the main concerns which were raised about these investments was that of Bangladesh falling into the same debt trap like Sri Lanka. But unlike Sri Lanka, the majority of the external debt Bangladesh owes is to multilateral financial institutions, and loans granted by China accounts for only 6 percent of its total debt, according to a lead economist from the World Bank. According to the Bangladesh government, it has an average time period of 31 years to pay off the loans with a grace period of 8 years, and it is confident of repaying even if the growth rate falls to 5 percent. In addition, there is also a difference in the Chinese style of functioning in Bangladesh and in other countries. China has gone for a partnership-based project implementation and also does not hold majority shares in most of the projects. So, the fear of Bangladesh falling into a debt trap looks unsubstantiated but it does not deny the fact that China’s influence and investments in the country have grown significantly in the past few years. Bangladesh is very aware of India’s security concerns and problems of over dependence on China. Bangladesh is trying to ride the fine line of balancing both these concerns. Despite the fact of increasing Chinese influence over the recent years, Bangladesh is among the least susceptible Indian neighbours to becoming overly dependent on China. That being said, this is a wake-up call for India to try and realise the full potential of its ties with Bangladesh and increase its economic and military ties besides the people-to-people ties.

Chinese translation:
 

RoaringTigerHiddenDragon

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Sorry my reply lead your emotional rant with off topic stuff, i thoguht your reply was stick to the railway related.

Here comes my points:

1. If you talking China's debt on HSR system by your standard, you shouldn't only quote the debt on Chinese HSR system, it refer to system with 250-350km/H. By your stadard, you should invole both train system with 200-250km/H train system as bullet train (动车), and 250-350km/H system as HSR (高铁); from this point, the ROI and debt level is acceptable.

2. The investment logics betwen "200-250km/H train system" and "250-350km train system" are different. In China, we upgard the current common rail network to reach "200-250km/H train system", which means the investment is quite low. But for 250-350km/H networks, we built from scratch. So your example on India so called "high speed train" is not proper to our 250-350km/H networks. We don't need to learn from your financial plan...

3. From marco view about national HSR system, the strategic benefit is more important than financial:
a. importing less planes from Boeing and Airbus
b. integrate west, middle, east part of China, with faster people/cargo transportation system.
c. Since 95% parts of Chinese HSR are indigenous, those money circulating in our own economy.
d. East part HSR is profitble now, Middle part HSR is break even, West HSR is lossing money, but the government treat it as strategic loss (like Xinjiang-Lanzhou HSR), we care more integration with remote area than money making.

4. Heard your first real HSR from Mumbai to Ahmedabad is already delayed, how much time cost and other cost wasted and would you suggest the ROI and debt on this project to me? I wanna learn, thanks.
#1 There is no data to claim “overall Chinese HSR costs” is justifiable. the fact remains that 90% costs are due to white elephant projects within HSR segment, including wasteful lines like the Chengdu-occupied Lhasa line.
#2 A lot of your 200-250kmph trains are pulled by GE engines (the notorious occupied Tibet line is pulled by GE engines). So, you traded dependence on Boeing and Airbus for dependence on GE and Caterpillar? That does not make sense. Your reverse engineered caterpillar engine (the core of the GE engine) was a total failure, by the way (main reason 90% of the ZCU engines you supplied to Pakshitstan broke down within a few years of operation and now are parked for parts cannibalization). So, you are dependent on the west for railway engine technology as well.
#3 No, the money does not circulate in your economy. Bankruptcy by state banks due to defaults by China railway cascades to other sectors like real estate where foreign institutional investors may have a high exposure and leads to Chinese citizens demanding their deposits back from failed banks, which leads to further collapse of the financial system (I.e. a run on the banks). The cascading debt crisis is something witnessed in all economies and famously the ASEAN debt crisis.
#4 China is struggling in mastering quality industrial engineering technologies including gas turbines (your carriers are powered by outdated steam turbines and not gas turbines like modern Indian carriers do), railway engines, power transmission (your electric traction are built by European companies like ABB - a Swiss company), and high voltage power distribution. You do not have technology independence in mega scale industrial engineering projects.

So, given this, China is headed for a serious debt crisis and has no option but to slow down or cancel mega engineering projects like the canceled HSR lines, ban on skyscrapers, ghost cities etc. Combined with all this, China is food insecure now - Africans are waking up and may kick China out of the agricultural slavery being pursued in African countries - with Xitler ordering people to eat less and not waste food in restaurants. Then China has made powerful enemies all over the world. With a falling growth rate, high debt, increasing mass poverty (600 million people below $150 per month), failed vaccination, doomed demographic, wasteful excess production capacity, supply chain threats, and hunger and personal bankruptcies on the rise , China is headed for a readjustment like no other country. Millions of Chinese are going to get shafted in this process just like during the wrongful implementation of the great leap backwards. Well done.
 

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India was, is and will be nowhere in the world


After the Narendra Modi-led government’s grave failure to combat the explosive second wave of Covid-19, this wave exacerbated by the Delta variant, Western media, think tanks and academia have shifted their attention to India again.


Earlier, the West projected India as a critical partner of the US to contain China’s economic and strategic clout.


That focus gained adherence after India and the US signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement in August 2016, and both countries inked the subsequent foundational agreements. US President Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, termed US strategy the “planned partnership for the entire 21st century.”


But now, in stark contrast, India is being dismissed in the Western world as an ineligible partner for the Western world to contain China. The Western refocus on India now in the West is the realization of Western strategists that they made a mistake to project India as a global player. They started to recognize that India has power and strategic illusion. But they made an error , misjudging India’s proper position.


Last October 20, I wrote an article in Asia Times entitled, “India is nowhere in the world, denial won’t work.” More than a thousand Indians from India and the Indian diaspora sent me insulting and abusive emails. I didn’t feel sad about those emails. Rather, they made me laugh, and I felt pity for those who sent them.

Some of my Indian scholarly friends inside and outside India also expressed their discontent with my article. They said they found my characterization of their country over the top.


However, my comments about India were not baseless. While working at the Nepal South Asia Centre, a Kathmandu-based South Asian think tank, I had the opportunity to observe South Asia very closely.


I have a fair understanding of trade, technology, economy, politics, culture, religion, population, democracy, human rights, international relations, diplomacy and the strategies of India and other South Asian countries. I also have had plenty of opportunity to observe the Indian psyche.


I used to tell my Indian friends to wait and see that my perception of India would be proven correct sooner or later.


The pumped-up claims by Indian political leaders, top bureaucrats, diplomats, think tanks, journalists and scholars for their ideas of India’s role on the global stage used to astonish me. I used to believe that they were immersed in a fantasy far away from ground reality.

I now recognize that there is a big difference between the powerful land they have imagined and India’s actual economic and strategic position on the global stage.


In exchanging views with my Indian friends, I had always advised them not to believe the baseless claims made by their cleverer-by-half leaders and babus (top bureaucrats). I kept repeating my assertion: “India is nowhere in the world.” Many Indian friends became furious after hearing me say it.


The miserable failure to combat the coronavirus pandemic has exposed India’s weakness. The West had a misconception that India is growing and can be a global player and instrumental in countering China. However, the epidemic helped the West to dispel its illusion.


Recall a few facts. India, among the South Asian countries, is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, 2020. India even lags behind literally starving countries such as Congo, Ethiopia and Angola.


One in five Indians still earns under US$37.50 a month – and 88.87 percent of the population or, in other words, nine out of ten, still make less than US$ 165 a month in India.

Economic activity in India is limited to a tiny population. Out of a population of 1.36 billion, only 14.6 million people had taxable income in the fiscal year 2018/2019. India’s taxable income is above the figure of US$6,750.


Only 4.6 million Indians earn more than one million Indian rupees, an amount that equals slightly less than US$13,500.


Urban India, known to the West as India, accounts for only about 35 percent of the country’s population. Sixty-five percent of India’s population lives in rural areas. Thus, the countryside of India is very different from what India looks like in the world.


Despite the economic reforms that began in July 1991, India only grew to join merely the $2.5 trillion economies in 2019. In the Lok Sabha election campaign 2019, the Modi government raised the slogan of creating a $5 trillion economy by 2024. But India’s ambition to become a $5 trillion economy is unlikely to be realized even by 2030.


After the Coronavirus outbreak in China in March last year, there was much hype insisting that the caravan of manufacturers from China would rush to India. But there was no basis and reason for international manufacturing companies to relocate to India from China. I wrote in Asia Times last year to explain why manufacturing companies would not relocate to India from China.

Thus, as I want to repeat once again, as always in the past, India was nowhere in the world. India is nowhere in the world now. And India will be nowhere in the world in the distant future.


It does not make sense to falsely claim that India becomes a vishwaguru (world teacher) or global economic power at ordinary times. Certainly there was no possibility that India could show leadership in a crisis.


Indian Prime Minister Modi was seen as a global leader in world politics because of the pro-Western policy of his external affairs minister S. Jaishankar. US President Donald Trump used India as a proxy in his China strategy to give the impression to American voters that he would contain China. Trump had a plan to use Modi to help him be reelected in the November 3, 2020, presidential poll. But he failed unsuccessful. Modi suffered from the delusion that Trump really looked upon him as a global leader.


American strategists are well aware that Indian political leaders and high-ranking government officials have Dionysian personality traits.


American Psychological Anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict says that there are two types of personality traits in human beings. The first is Apollonian, and the second is Dionysian. An Apollonian person does not seek status and doesn’t want a leadership role. Meanwhile, the Dionysian person seeks more status than he/she deserves.


Due to the Dionysian personality traits prevalent among the Indian political leaders who seek more status than they actually command in reality, Indians have come to believe that they can play a role in rebalancing the US and China in the world.


The media coverage of India’s failure to control Covid-19 in the West means a lot to India. First, the West has concluded that India cannot play the role that the West wants India to play.


The West has realized that any miscalculation against China by relying on India would have cost the United States dearly, depending on India. A recently published report in the Financial Times is an example. Those who saw India’s role yesterday seem to become mindful that there’s no role India can play now.


The Biden administration looks like it is now working to reset China’s policy. Recently, the Financial Times quotes US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley as saying, “I think China has a ways to go to develop the actual, no-kidding capability to conduct military operations to seize, through military means, the entire island of Taiwan, if they wanted to do that,” at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.


Similarly, Bernie Sanders, in his most recent article in Foreign Affairs, has called for a change in China policy. Thus, the US wants to alter the China policy.


Even within India, some scholars, responsible journalists and think tanks have concluded that India is nowhere in the world currently and will not be soon. Recently, Kanti Bajpai admitted this fact in his interview with senior Indian journalist Karan Thapar about his recent book India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends.


So what is the actual position of India in the world?


Modi’s India is in the same situation as I said in last year’s Asia Times article. I wrote, “There is a very popular Hindi proverb, “Dhobi ka kutta, na Ghar ka na ghat ka.” A working translation: “A person who is supported nowhere.”


Modi will find no beneficial friends when he needs them in the future by putting all his eggs in the American basket.




Chinese Translation:
Fuck off wumao.
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