READ FOR YOURSELF IF YOU FIND THE OP-ED TO BE RACIST AGAINST CHINESE:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-the-real-sick-man-of-asia-11580773677
TITLE: China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia
Its financial markets may be even more dangerous than its wildlife markets.
by Walter Russell Mead
(EXCERPT)
Epidemics also lead us to think about geopolitical and economic hypotheticals. We have seen financial markets shudder and commodity prices fall in the face of what hopefully will be a short-lived disturbance in China’s economic growth. What would happen if—perhaps in response to an epidemic, but more likely following a massive financial collapse—China’s economy were to suffer a long period of even slower growth? What would be the impact of such developments on China’s political stability, on its attitude toward the rest of the world, and to the global balance of power?
China’s financial markets are probably more dangerous in the long run than China’s wildlife markets. Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction. Even a small initial shock could lead to a massive bonfire of the vanities as all the false values, inflated expectations and misallocated assets implode. If that comes, it is far from clear that China’s regulators and decision makers have the technical skills or the political authority to minimize the damage—especially since that would involve enormous losses to the wealth of the politically connected.
We cannot know when or even if a catastrophe of this scale will take place, but students of geopolitics and international affairs—not to mention business leaders and investors—need to bear in mind that China’s power, impressive as it is, remains brittle. A deadlier virus or a financial-market contagion could transform China’s economic and political outlook at any time.
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“Sick man of Asia” was a derogatory term for China referencing the inability to get things done in general and the huge Chinese population of Chinese opiate addicts in particular during the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the British and sometimes other western powers flooded China with Opium and blocked a succession of Chinese governments from clearing out the drug trade.
Indeed, part of the reason Mao was able to take over China was because Chang Kai-check was in bed with the drug trade and Truman was unwilling to withdraw support and award it to some other Chinese contender who was neither beholden to the drug trade nor a communist.
Given a situation where the only two choices were for the extent of the Opium problem to continue or giving communism a shot the Chinese chose to get rid of the evil they had endured so long.
It is intellectually void to quip that “they chose poorly” when both of the only available choices were so poor.
Anyone who is even aware of the term “Sick man of Asia” is likely to be aware of the meaning and origin of the term.
Now you can watch Bruce Lee's Fist Of Fury and catch some of the references.
“Sick man of Asia” was a derogatory term for China referencing the inability to get things done in general and the huge Chinese population of Chinese opiate addicts in particular during the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the British and sometimes other western powers flooded China with Opium and blocked a succession of Chinese governments from clearing out the drug trade.
Indeed, part of the reason Mao was able to take over China was because Chang Kai-check was in bed with the drug trade and Truman was unwilling to withdraw support and award it to some other Chinese contender who was neither beholden to the drug trade nor a communist.
Given a situation where the only two choices were for the extent of the Opium problem to continue or giving communism a shot the Chinese chose to get rid of the evil they had endured so long.
It is intellectually void to quip that “they chose poorly” when both of the only available choices were so poor.
Anyone who is even aware of the term “Sick man of Asia” is likely to be aware of the meaning and origin of the term.
Now you can watch Bruce Lee's Fist Of Fury and catch some of the references.