Violent Unrest Rocks China as Crisis Hits

The Times of India ^ | 1 Feb 2009,

[nickcarraway]

LONDON: The collapse of the export trade in China has left millions jobless and set off a wave of violent unrest in the country.

Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to an independent research that paints an ominous picture for the world economy, The Sunday Times reported.

The research was conducted for the newspaper over the last two months in three provinces vital to Chinese trade - Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

It was found that the global economic crisis has scythed through exports and set off dozens of protests that are never mentioned by the state media.

According to the report in the southern province of Guangdong, three jobless men detonated a bomb in a business travellers' hotel in the commercial city of Foshan to extort money from the management.

All along the coast, angry workers besieged labour offices and government buildings after dozens of factories closed their doors, without paying wages and their owners went back to Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea.

In southern China, hundreds of workers blocked a highway to protest against pay cuts imposed by managers. At several factories, there were scenes of chaos as police were called to stop creditors breaking in to seize equipment in lieu of debts.

In northern China, television journalists were punished after they prepared a story on the occupation of a textile mill by 6,000 workers.

Furious local leaders in the city of Linfen said the news item would "destroy social stability" and banned it.

[toomuchcoffee]

” Now all we have is the crappy Chinese imports”

:-D

[jws3sticks]

Hey, protesters, just don’t stand in front of a tank. Ged’it?

[ff52051]

I guess have a religion to believe is healthy for most westers, and the biggest religion here is the “China collapse” religion, LOL.

And talking about export collapse? I think you guys need a nice reality checker:

Growth rate of export: (Nov, 2008-Dec, 2008)
China -2.2%, -2.8%
India -12%, no data
Germany -10%, -11%
Japan -27%, -35%
Korea -17%, -18%

As for US’s export, is likey to be around -20%, according to this:

http://www.lloydslist.com/ll/news/container-traffic-through-la-long-beach-collapses/20017608807.htm

So if you guys prefer using the word “collapse” to describe China’s economy/export, etc, then you need to invent a new word to describe your own economy.

Truth hurts.

[grey_whiskers]

Let's also not forget that millions of these angry Chinese men cannot find wives due to the one child policy.

Send over a re-education team from San Francisco.

[txhurl]

Yeh, but our economy doesn’t consist of exporting cheap chinese crap like yours does.

[Maceman]

They have had a small taste of the benefits of capitalism. All the propaganda on earth can’t take that away.

I don't know. Americans had the benefits of capitalism for more than 200 years. But the last 40 years of propaganda from politicians, the media and university professors seem to have done a pretty good job of taking it away here.

[MimirsWell]

You are a rather stupid propagandist.

1) Export amounts for 30-40% of Chinese GDP, therefore -2% is roughly -.6 to -.8% of GDP in just one month

2) The other countries you quote are democracies, where the people have ample opportunity to throw out the incumbent government if they believe it is policies that need to change. The Chinese can’t do anything more than protest for now. If they don’t see results, your masters will be throw out and you’ll need to look for a new job.

Also, what are the vehicles for growth for the Chinese? More infrastructure as usual - more roads to nowhere, more airports in the middle of nowhere, more ports for ships that ain’t leaving or coming - what else? Public housing? There’s only some chatter on that regard. None of this creates “sustainable” domestic consumption.

In Wuhan, I met the son of a Da Lao Ban of a local company that builds roads and bridges, during the heights of the “Xi Bu Da Kai Fa” craze. He drove a hummer and the dashboard of the hummer was jam-packed with cash. Most of the new infrastructure projects will go precisely the same way - into the pockets of people with guanxi. And the protests in the east-coast will continue.

I also met businessmen from Fujian a month ago. You must have heard the “praises” they showered on your leaders - Hu JinTao and Wen JiaBao. Wen JiaBao more so. Some of the adjectives they used would suffice for the CCP to seek new leaders in charge. If only the leadership had the pulse of your country.

[bert]

Mean while in America, workers must be notified 60 days in advance of layoff so they can sabotage the products and equipment before they leave.

[TheRightGuy]

What is their government going to do to redirect their rage?

Hopefully, point'em at Mecca.

[bert]

......I wonder why we’re not seeing shortages here......

Inventory

In a while, there will be a problem.

I suspect that when 180 days have passed, there will be some dampening of the wild fluctuations. That will be around the end of March or the first of April.

The international banking and payments system must stabilize before trade can resume. If there is no process for international payments and money flow, there is no trade.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

They put a real high value on social stability over there. I don’t think there’s an upper limit to the number of individuals they’d kill to insure stability. :(
That’s if I believe this story at all.

[reformedliberal]

I think there is still a large overhang of things like clothing, kitchenware and toys.

There are many businesses that buy up overstock, closeouts and liquidations and then sell them at a discount to the original price. People have really cut back, most of us have so much excess, we can easily go a year or so, except perhaps for children's clothing and shoes, without buying anything at all.

Buy American was a conservative issue just a few months ago, but it was directed more at clothing, shoes, household products. zerO wants to throw a bone to the steel worker unions, not understanding the downstream effect on our auto and structural component industries, who would be forced to pay higher prices domestically in order to stay in business. OTOH, I have been hearing tales of scrap yards hoarding steel in anticipation of just such shortages.

That is the problem of picking favorites in the marketplace and ignoring both the effects on other domestic producers and the natural response of suppliers who can still react creatively.

There is still an entrepreneurial streak in Americans. I doubt we will see any shortages as long as people are constrained in their spending. I predict the rise of small domestic producers if such shortages do occur. I recall recycled steel production during the last surge in steel prices due to domestic policy.

Even if domestic production is somehow curtailed, no one can stop people from their own home production, such as sewing clothing, even if the raw materials have to be the existing outgrown clothing. An 80+-year-old friend of mine tells a story about her mother making her a winter coat out of carpet samples, back in the 1920s, for example. If you have ever shopped at Aldi’s, you can see that there are many discount lines for canned food, all of it in the very same cans as the higher priced lines.

Of course, this creative response could all be obviated if the administration and Congress tighten their micro-management of the economy,

[ff52051]

It seems that, as usual, you are not bright at numbers:

The total export in 2008 for China is ~1.4 trillion USD, thats 31% of our GDP, and during Nov.to Dec. 2008 our export is down ~2.5%, meanwhile most other countries get a -12% to -35% negative growth in export, during the same period of time.

That means, unless the export account for ~3% of those countries GDP, the collapse of export is far and away more significant to other countries than to China.

In reality, for most countries, export account for a far-higher share of their GDP, for instance, 33% of Germany’s GDP is export, the number is around 20% for Japan and India.

That means, despite the fact you desperately try to make your number looks as less pathetic as possible, the reality is, the collapse of export has 5-10 times worse impact your economy than it to ours.

Truth hurts.

[ff52051]

Which means every year you guys spend hundreds of trillions dollar to import craps.

So it seems that you guys dont have a very high standard afterall.

[Sawdring]

Just what the world needs, 10s of millions of angry Chinese men who are out of work

It could be balanced by 10s of millions of angry Indians out of work.

[PapaBear3625]

The old Chinese peasant could be stoic in the face of poverty and potential starvation. He had never known any other kind of life.

Somebody who had known the taste of a middle-class life for the last few years, with good food, clothes, warm apartment, etc, who is now faced with the possibility of having to plant rice in a swampy field fertilized with human excrement, is not going to face his fate stoically. He's going to be damn pissed off.

[PapaBear3625]

I also said that China’s greatest threat to the world would be if they opened their borders and let them all go.

In a 1973 visit to China, Kissinger chided Mao on China's restrictions on allowing Chinese people to leave China. Mao responded that China had 10 million excess women -- would the US like to have them all? Mao said he would be happy to send all 10 million to the US as refugees. Kissinger never brought up the subject again.

[AuntB]

Know how the Chinese government will control this? They’ll blame the USA and the peasants will believe it. Ya reap what ya sow, and China is going to cost us plenty for our cheap labor experiment.

[PapaBear3625]

The total export in 2008 for China is ~1.4 trillion USD, thats 31% of our GDP, and during Nov.to Dec. 2008 our export is down ~2.5%, meanwhile most other countries get a -12% to -35% negative growth in export, during the same period of time.

The United States market accounts for 19% of your exports. If the United States decided to close its markets to China, Party members and their lackeys would be hanging from every available tree within weeks as China's economy collapsed.

[sefarkas]

When I look at the CIA fact book, it says the US GDP is 14.58 trillion That means, 1.4 trillion is less than 10%, not 31%. Furthermore, all economic stats obtained from Chinese government sources are suspect due to methods of collection and the political food chain through which the numbers are filtered.