Hard News: Shihad are like the All Blacks, only more reliable
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BTW - the term Asian is defined by Statistics NZ as peoples from Afghanistan to Indonesia, including North Asia. How they classify people from the Central Asian Republics like the Stans is something Im unsure about but would assume is in the definition of Asian. However I think Russia, Turkey and Israel are outside the Stats NZ definition.
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Oh I know. Stats are wrong :-)
Asia extends to the Mediterranean and the Urals. Since it's awkward to split bicontinental countries like Russia and Turkey, it's reasonable to put the former in Europe and the latter in Asia, based on where the majority of their population live.
Stats seem to be taking a compromise between the ignorant traditional attitude that Asia==East Asia and the actual geographical reality.
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yes, I agree. Having studied Greek and Roman history, I'm conscious that for the ancient Greeks and Romans, Asia began on the other side of the Bosphorus with Asia Minor and from there to Asia Major or the Far East.
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Just to quibble, my Russian Teacher made a point of stating that Russians aren't European.
For the longest time they have identified with Asia and share many histories, stories and ethnic make up from Asia. She made a point of noting the influence of Iran on Russian culture.
Indeed St Petersburg, built on the bones of Russians as depicted in "The Overcoat" is often described as a most unRussian city. -
The GDP figure I gave is PPP adjusted. I looked up the 2006 figure and it's $7,800 PPP ($2,034 nominal). Growth is 11.4%, so I think they are still a bit shy of NZ. No doubt Guangdong is doing much better and has far surpassed NZ, but I was considering China as a unitary state.
But you simply can't apply apply those figures as a unitary state...and if you'd been there that would be glaringly obvious. Guangdong and the other eastern provinces are vastly different places and the economic revolution has benefited those places far more than the hinterland to date although clearly it's moving inward and the massive infrastructure projects are a part of that. In the east the massive and growing middle class is little diffrent to that you'd find in NZ except it has, as does the general population, access to things like roading, public transport, new hospital and the like that its NZ equivalent does not. The populace have massive shopping malls (not just one or two but dozens) which feature shops that don't even bother to open in Australasia, they drive newer cars than one sees in NZ on average, they have travel the world. Now, I'm not putting a value on all that but clearly they have access to some cash. That all this has happened in a decade and a half in phenomenal..I wonder what the NZ / China balance will be in 10 years?
I just think that Chinese people have the same rights to democracy, free expression and national self-determination as New Zealanders. I don't see that as xenophobic. I'm interested in why and whether it seems that a lot of Chinese people (like those who marched in Wellington) appear not to want such things?
Well there is no doubting that the current government is widely popular both inside and outside China with Chinese citizens despite western reservations. As that link Bob provided illustrated, the ruling party encompasses a wider range of opinions and beliefs than one would believe looking from the outside, and that, at a provincial level officials, including non-CCP members, are elected but I'm also a great believer that if one educates sooner or later people stand up and say no. However I'd also suggest that those who come from the nation may have more of a grasp on what the day to day reality is there than any interested observer and whilst it may not be xenophobic it's certainly paternalistic to suggest that we know better.
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All the European powers were fairly authoritarian imperial states ruled by small and wealthy elites (this varied between Britain, which was probably the most democratic and Russia, which was about the least...........because it considered its vital national interest to be served by maintaining as close ties as possible to a distant imperial power.
No, I know all that, I've put a fair amount of time into reading about the war and it took many months of my life when at university but I still can't work out why it needed to happen beyond the arrogance and belligerence of the politicians of the day. It was the war that did not need to be fought and nothing positive came from it.
Historians have probably written more words and spent more hours on the origins of WW1 than any other topic.
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I haven’t read it but James Kynge's China Shakes the World is very highly regarded. He was interviewed by Chris Laidlaw about three weeks ago. Very interesting.
In his summary chapter at the end of China Road Gifford quotes James Kynge.
In his brilliant book, China Shakes The World, the former Beijing correspondent of the Financial Times James Kynge illustrates this point
(that we're all in this together)
by standing outside a Wal-Mart in Rockford Illinois, and asking the shoppers of middle America whether they feel like thanking the Chinese for all the cheap goods they can buy, and for the low interest rates they pay on their mortgages. Not surprisingly, he gets some funny looks. But his point and mine, is that, while China is certainly harming some areas of Western economies, it is also doing a lot of good to Western pockets in much less visible ways. So we have to make sure that, while we stand up to China in important areas, we do not damage our own interest in the process.
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But isn't that a bit like turning up in the UK during the 80s miners strike, spending most of one's time in the area of London inside the Circle Line and concluding that everything was wonderful and the strike was clearly an anti-British fabrication.
Also, if the government is so popular, why don't they just hold full-scale elections with anyone able to stand and vote? I don't believe that democracy and human rights are a western cultural construct.
Having said that, I don't believe we should impose our ideas on others through force, as the Americans are trying and failing to do with the (equally wrongheaded) adherents to militant Islam. What we should do, as a democracy, is to allow the freest possible exchange of ideas. That includes allowing people in NZ who do oppose the Chinese regime full freedom to demonstrate.
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nothing positive came from it.
End of tsarism.
Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and creation of modern Turkey.
Beginnings of the collapse of the British Empire (the war was a turning point in British economic fortunes).
Womens suffrage (partly)
Beginnings of a world system to limit conflict.Arguably these would have happened if it hadn't been for WW1, but maybe they wouldn't. It took a further world war and forty-odd years of the Cold War for a lot of them to come to fruition, but the United Nations and European Union are both the legacy of Europe's 20th century conflicts.
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I agree with Simon. The China story is one of three huge themes of the late 20th entury and early 21st century. I believe the other two are the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and climate change.
The thing about China is that many New Zealanders still talk as if choosing to engage or ignore China was a choice that was still open to us. There is no choice. There really is no alternative but to learn how to live with China. And I do believe engaging and trying to influence China's political and economic development is a better option than trying to isolate (as if we could).
We need to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated in our understanding of a country that is shaping the world. And it is doing it at speed.
The product recalls and quality control issues that were news in New Zealand (and around the world) last year really brought it home just how dependent we already are on China. And from that stemmed quite a bit of discussion about poor quality Chinese made goods and products. Well, the news is that China makes low and high end products - including luxury cars, iPods, plasma screen television and laptops.
There are parallels with the way Japanese made goods were regarded as inferior in the 70s ('Jap crap'). No one says that about Japanese made products now.
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Well there is no doubting that the current government is widely popular both inside and outside China with Chinese citizens despite western reservations
Funnily enough Gifford disputes this. It's a bit unfair on his wonderful book to summarise here but essentially he says corruption runs deep and in the rural areas still untouched by economic progress there are vast numbers of peasants now without the safety net that existed under Mao's communism. He sees the attempt at rapid economic expansion into these hinterlands partly as an attempt at survival by the present CPC.
He would probably agree with the sentiments of the Tibetan leader mentioned by Russell on page 4 of this thread thst political change is inevitable but it could be very messy indeed. He postulates the decade 2010-20 will be the one for some sort of political upheaval driven by all these pressures currently bubbling away.
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But isn't that a bit like turning up in the UK during the 80s miners strike, spending most of one's time in the area of London inside the Circle Line and concluding that everything was wonderful and the strike was clearly an anti-British fabrication.
Living as I did in central London during the miners strike, and travelling daily on said line, it was pretty much in your face daily. Striking miners were collecting at every station as I recall and the division over it was national.
Also, if the government is so popular, why don't they just hold full-scale elections
They do hold elections on a local level and those who go to the Party Congress are elected. It's also worth repeating that China is not a one party state, it's a controlled multi party state....which in real terms means little of course.
End of tsarism.
although one would've hoped that there were better ways to achieve this than Stalinism, 25 million dead in WW2 and 70 years of Soviet Russia.
I'm not sure if the other positives you list can justify the Somme and the war's aftermath and I'd argue that some were inevitable, Turkey and suffrage for example.
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What Rich said - there were actually a huge number of positive outcomes from WW I. Hell, the acceptablitiy of widespread anti-war movements was another he skipped. And the loss of the Ottoman Empire is often downplayed (I guess we're too busy berating white people for horrible things they did in the Middle East during the 20th Century to worry about the horrible things the Ottomans had been doing for the previous few centuries).
The loss of monarchies all over Europe was a huge win, as was the disintegration of the Autro-Hungarian Empire.
As far as causes, two of my favourites are:
1/ Railway timetables. Deploymnet of men was by railway. This actually effectively locked the continental European powers into a war footing - a MAD, if you like. The German millitary knew that if the French mobilised more than a couple of hours beforer they did, that the French could advance deep into German territory before the Germans could respond, and vice versa. The ability to pause and think was negated - once Russia decided to back the Serbs, France knew they had to move, because if they didn't they'd pretty much lose if Germany did, and the Germans knew the same was the other way around.
2/ That WW I was the best argument against monarchy. The more I've read about Wilhelm (__Dreadnought__ and other pieces on the era) the more apparent it's looked to me that the guy was looking for a confrontation with Britain and his cousin. You name it - inferiority complex, delusions of granduer - the Kaiser had it. And, unfortunatley for Germany (and, ultimately, most everyone else), Bismark's structure for a united Germany left no real checks and balances short of a coup against him.
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Quite a few grammatical errors in my previous post - but never mind.
Anti government demonstrations do happen in China. As I mentioned earlier, some commentators estimate there are up to 40,000 demonstrations annually over issues such as corrupt and incompetent officials, land seizures, environmental degradation, food prices etc.
The two big issues that got quite a bit of attention recently were over public opposition to the extension of the Maglev train route in Shanghai and a proposed chemical plant near Xiamen in Fujian province.
Asia Times story here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/JC20Cb01.htmlVideo of the Shanghai protest here:
http://shanghaiist.com/2008/01/14/maglev_protest_1.php -
Well, the news is that China makes low and high end products - including luxury cars, iPods, plasma screen television and laptops.
And I wonder what percentage of those it actually consumes itself now. China is in a similar place to the USA in 1939 where it has a massive manufacturing base coupled to a massive internal market, and anything else is cream, albeit a large dollop. Americas cream came from WW2 and China's from the fact that the world's major market, the USA, no longer manufactures much. But in both cases they didn't / don't need the cream to survive.
Of interest is that many of the people i know who trade daily with China are reporting that invoicing is done and payment is now required in RMY rather than USD.
Funnily enough Gifford disputes this. It's a bit unfair on his wonderful book to summarise here but essentially he says corruption runs deep and in the rural areas still untouched by economic progress there are vast numbers of peasants now without the safety net that existed under Mao's communism.
i think that fascinating link of yours a few pages back touched on this, and the huge urban drift.
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i think that fascinating link of yours a few pages back touched on this, and the huge urban drift.
Some of the scales involved here make my head hurt. Bit like trying to imagine the distance to the nearest star and what's beyond that. Think I'll get down to what I can cope with like have we seen the end of the All Blacks as we have known them?
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China is fortunate in that it has brought prosperity to millions of Chinese by manufacturing for its export markets. Now if those export markets stall, it has a rapidly growing domestic market to keep its economy surging along.
The $64 thousand dollar question is how China's looming energy demands and growing environmental crisis will impact on its economic growth. One to watch.
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The loss of monarchies all over Europe was a huge win, as was the disintegration of the Autro-Hungarian Empire.
Once again, inevitability comes into play. WW1 may have sped this up but it was going to happen and the roots of of WW2 laid. But surely the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian was more a root cause of WW1 than a result of it
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The various European states had been resolving their quarrels in frequent warfare since the tribes of Europe had coalesced into nation states. Britain had been to war in Europe twice in the 19th Century (as well as countless colonial conflicts).
It was the invention of railways (as rodgerd points out), trench warfare (chalk the blame down to NZ for that one) and modern artillery that turned war from a background activity into a slaughter that killed millions and destroyed empires.
So I think the answer to why the European leaders embarked on war has to be that it was simply what they always had done - and without both democracy and a realisation of the horrors of modern warfare, there was little to restrain them.
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Over a million overseas students have returned, 26% of the total.
http://english.people.com.cn/200706/25/text20070625_387289.html
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Mark, the way i read it 26 percent of the over one million overseas educated Chinese have returned to live and work in China.
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yeah, you're quite right. my mistake. seems a low figure to me.
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and without both democracy and a realisation of the horrors of modern warfare, there was little to restrain them.
I agree but I think the age of modern warfare arrived a little earlier if they had cared to look and listen.
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Earlier even. "modern warfare" was largely invented by Oliver Comwell and his roundheads.
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Earlier even. "modern warfare" was largely invented by Oliver Comwell and his roundheads.
But missed the rapid fire weaponry that was available in 1864.
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