China: Doing interesting things with our money.
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.
The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.
Those evil Chinese, having their government do things for them instead of private business.
Twenty-nine rail lines, totalling 3,100 miles, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centres. According to planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 per cent and hospitals and schools will be improved.
“Residents will be able to choose where to get their services and will use the internet to find out which hospital, for example, is less busy,” said Mr Ma.
“China: Doing interesting things with our money.”
How is it “our” money, we are borrowing it from china, not the other way around. Am I missing something here?
‘the residents can travel around freely’…’Residents will be able to choose where to get their services’…
Funny, but it kinda sounds like a novel idea. It almost sounds like ‘residents’ are prohibited from doing that today.
It also almost sounds like it’s becoming more like…wait for it…’Supply and Demand Capitalism’…
I’m sure that child molester Chairman Mao is spinning in his grave…
#2: Not at all. We send our money over to China in exchange for labor and goods rather than make things ourselves and keep our money in our country. The irony is they are then lending it back to us to prop up our economy.
Somehow, I doubt that this could be sustainable. That kind of population density can wreck havoc on an ecosystem.
Of course this is only in that designated fake ‘free trade zone’ right…those 2 or 3 areas in China that pretend they’re not communist. Not to harp on it, but isn’t China still a communist one party rule country? The cities we all talk about are in ‘special’ zones where they pretend they’re not communist and allow Starbucks and such.
And that’s a lot of people. But keep in mind the coming civil war in China. You think OUR discrepancy between middle class and the top 1% is bad…the poor in China (outside of these magic trade zones) are REALLY poor (some don’t even have X-Box with Kinect). Of course the civil war may be put off by 80% of the country dying of cancer from the total lake of environmental laws (a major part of WHY we dumped our manufacturing on China) where they can just pump toxic waste into the rivers and ground water.
If China had all this wonderful stuff, paid wages to have a real sustainable middle class (who could buy Starbucks and X-Box) and didn’t pollute their country to the point of destruction, they wouldn’t BE cheap enough to dump our production on…so…enjoy it while you can guys!
Ah. Now we can view comments from those who have the world view of a grub.
China’s the bogeyman that scares Americans the most. In reality there’s hardly a developed (or developing) nation which isn’t stepping over the decrepit form of American gridlocked infrastructure/economy/education.
Many of the major firms in the S&P500, for example, now earn 75% of their income outside the United States. As long as Congress is dedicated to appeasing military-industrial vendors and the Oil Patch Boys to the exclusion of the rest of our manufacturing and design industries – the process will only accelerate. Ignoring what potential there could be inside our borders.
The classic railroading term applies perfectly to the politicians – and voters – who tweet their fears and huddle around the safe little campfire at the entrance of their cave mentality. Deadheads.
P.S. This “China is funding us” meme is cute, but you DO realize it’s not true? China is just ONE of the countries that owns U.S. securities. China is the single biggest owner ($900B), at nearly 20%. But Japan owns ALMOST as much ($877B). The UK owns nearly $400B. Little Brazil owns $170B. And so on through the entire world.
So China is a big player, but not this magic single owner of America, despite how cute that is to constantly report.
Think of 42 million little stooped-over Chinese old ladies looking in all the trash cans and digging out the soda, jabbering with other Chinese people wearing purple coats, and striped and flowered patterned clothing. With cheesy baseball caps.
Think of 42 million drivers turning from the left lanes to turn right!
The noise! Screaming at each other: YING SHO YANG KONG! CLANG GONGK YWONK YING! All fucking day long!
My god! Grant Ave times a trillion!
Damn! Just awful, I’d say!
At least there is a huge ocean between us.
“Those evil Chinese, having their government do things for them instead of private business.”
For all those who love the Chinese government and the idea that a dictatorship can do things that a democratic government can’t: well it’s true, they can build a railroad where-ever they want. They can force thousands to relocate so they can build new buildings, etc.
But they can only do these things if they have money. And China has the money. We gave it to them. (We borrowed it from them first, then bought their stuff with the borrowed money. But under the crazy rules of capitalism, that’s ok.)
You may hope (and change) and wish that our government could just do anything it wants. But we’ve spent all the money, plus $13 trillion more. And taxing every millionaire in the country (or simply taking all their money) won’t give us enough money.
The West won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. China is now doing the same to us.
I’m old enough to have total Deja Vu on this “China will take us over” meme anyway. I was told in the 70’s that the Soviet Union was our big threat and we would be in an endless battle with THEIR might. Turned out they another paper tiger. They didn’t really innovate or build or design anything. Then in the 80s it was Japan. Go watch the movie “Rising Sun” with Sean Connery. Oh we were in TROUBLE! Japan was KICKING OUR ASS and we’d clearly all be speaking Japanese shortly. Yeah. They’ve been in a recession since the 80s.
All this reminds me of that saying, “America has the worst form of government on earth, except for all the others.” For all America’s problems (and we have plenty of things to work on, like our infrastructure) the other countries (like China) have JUST AS MANY and MORE problems. See you’re comparing ONE element. China IS spending more than we are on infrastructure. So surely they’ll take us over. Yeah, except for ALL OF THEIR OTHER PROBLEMS! The one party rule. The environmental collapse coming soon. The ‘fight’ over the people living under the “we’re still communist” rule vs the people in the BMW – Starbucks world…etc…etc.
Anyone replying ever been to the area? I have. It is typical Communist BS.
First, why is it being created: Chinese are open in stating that this is a buffer zone toward Hong Kong. Economically, politically, physically,…
Second: Can any “free” Chinese go there and enjoy benefits and work? No. In essence it is sub-foreign country within China. You need passport and visa equivalent to get in (as Chinese from China, not just as foreigner in China).
Finally: Been there (Shenzhen-> Dongguan-> Guangzhou). There is indeed new industry and fast modern building boom. Haphazardly interlaced with poverty that would put Rio’s favelas to shame. Wide new boulevards with shiny cars and people transported in “sardine packs” on open tractor-trailers…
Lived in Communism and I know where this leads. Phrase is “White Elephant”. But it will serve the main purpose – it is indeed safety valve between inland China and Hong Kong.
I’m old enough to have total Deja Vu on this “China will take us over” meme anyway. I was told in the 1870′s that the USA was our big threat and we would be in an endless battle with THEIR might. Turned out we exported our manufacturing while engaged in foreign wars and lost our Empire in about 60 years.
China is bifurcated/income stratified though. Going to an airport and being delayed because of a bridge out, our tour bus toured a random “town” on the side of the road. No paved anything, dirt clod huts with wood and mud roofs, fire built in corner of the room with smoke going out a hole in the ceiling. No running water. Open sewage system wandering thru the village of about 50 homes. Each one occupied by about 5-6 people–in 10 square feet. Very friendly people rarely seeing outsiders. About half the huts had a goat staked near the front door eating trash and about the other half of the huts had a solar panel hooked up to a tv. No furniture, no phone, no radio. TV. Progress.
Does anyone see Final Fantasy VII in this scheme? I know that is Japanese in origin, but when I read this story, FF7 is what I pictured. Nuts, right?
# 5 Mac Guy said, “That kind of population density can wreck havoc on an ecosystem.”
Looks like they thought of that. They plan to kill off about 6 million people. That is if the article and it’s map are to be believed. (42M inhabitants but the 9 cities add up to 48M)
But I know what you mean. Go to Beijing and try to breathe. Just try. And if the air don’t kill you, you’ll probably break your neck when you slip and fall on someone’s festering loogie.
>Many of the major firms in the S&P500, for example, now earn 75% of their income outside the United States.
You seem to think this is a major insight. However, it is not the big firms going overseas, it is that the firms that go overseas as well will be bigger. YOur statement is a tautology.
We a sell them bottles of clean air,
because they wont have any.
#2 & #4
Seems pointless since our money has been worthless since the turn of the last century. The Fed can just snap their fingers and print more worthless paper that we “agree” has some monetary value, against some other country’s paper that has some monetary value.
Isn’t most “money” just a number on a computer somewhere at a bank anyway? Even cheaper create money from literally nothing when it’s just a number on a computer screen.
Funny thing is it’s considered “credit” not actual money sitting in your checking account. After all, if we all know there isn’t enough print money in the world to pay everyone if everyone emptied their bank accounts all at once.
And if a bank-run ever DID happen to make the Fed close down, then all that paper money would literally BE worthless.
invest in precious metals.
The beginning of making our planet like Coruscant?
AWESOME – I wonder how many Starbucks locations that many people could handle…
The names of the existing cities are hard for me to pronounce. They better better come up with something easier to spell and say like Hong Kong or I’m never visiting.
“By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and “small” city clusters of 10 million to 25 million.
In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin, two of China’s most important cities, is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million.”
In about 200 years, China will become a city anyway. They are just getting the framework in place.
Great! The world’s largest third-world SLUM!
I only have three words for Chinese urban planners: asymmetrical warfare vulnerability.
They can see what we are stuck with, with our old world agglomerations like London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, (all terrorist targets which need constant vigilance,) and yet they are willing to put themselves at risk from the same kind of stupidity, wasting money building big expensive things that can get broken easily.
They could build a wide open low density urban conglomeration, without hard to defend targets, on the fringe of the Gobi desert, which could supply them with all the room and free energy they would ever need (passive and active solar,) to run heating and cooling plants, desalination/filtration plants, recycling plants, none of which is big enough to make an efficient explosive target, but no…
They ave to think “Why don’t we build Bejing and Tianjin a bunch of huge sub-cities.”
In #10 chuck said taxing every millionaire in the country […] won’t give us enough money.
How many billionaires are there in this country?
That’s a thousand to one ratio of ûber-rich to millionaires (the merely rich,), which are still vastly outnumbered by the (shrinking,) number of middle-class and the (growing,) number of poor (who don’t make enough to bother taxing.)
Get reality based…
If it wasn’t for this idiocy about not taxing these ûber-rich and the merely rich with soe form of sensible graduated income tax, we’d have a paid up social security system and health care.
While I’m on the subject of big expensive things that can get broken easily, imagine how little explosive you really need to utterly destroy the Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai.)
If just one leg of the spire gets broken halfway up at an angle by successive explosions, it can render the entire structure uninhabitable and unusable.
Now, are you so sure about wanting an office in Dubai?
This country has the current winner of the Nobel Prize locked in jail. The last winner of the prize hosted a state dinner for that country’s leader.
1873 Colt in #9 said: something worthy of Rush Limbaugh.
What he fuck is it with Americans and any other language but English?
There are several languages spoken in this hemisphere, French, Spanish, Portuguese, a hundred of so Amerind languages and dialects, but to hear about it from Rush Limbaugh there is only English.
There are about 3,500 languages world wide.
Learn a few. Teach your kids a few.
You wouldn’t feel the need to distinguish between “Free as in beer” from “free as in speech” if you had the word libre in your vocabulary.
Likewise using only one word “love” when you might mean “agape or eros or philios or storge, leads to much confusion.
Too many people and too many problems. It’s interesting to watch China try to figure this out, though. Can they deal with it?
Try to get one of those authoritarian “one child per family” policies going in the good old USA…no friggin’ WAY!!
But, hey…we should be putting our heads together with the Asians and their ancient cultures, find out what’s common between them and Western ones (and all others too). Here’s a few:
– Everybody wants to have a better life, with education and material comforts etc.
– All parents want their children to do better than they did.
– A strong work ethic is very important.
– If you want to have a stable, prosperous society, citizens have to not fear and mistrust one another (or the police). If they can accomplish that, it may not matter much what kind of government they have going.
The list goes on (I think it’s actually quite a long one)
Dictators LOVE trains.
As I recall, the Italians were most pleased that Il Duce improved rail service.
want an example of something like this that already happened? look at the current megacity of toronto. that was once 6 separate cities (toronto, north york, york, east york, etobicoke, and scarborough) and is now one major city. this wuold just be a larger scale of that endeavor.