12.13.06
全世界最漂亮的女人
If you haven’t met 毛毛 (Melanie) then you are really missing out. Hopefully you’ll have a chance to meet her soon. Here’s another preview for your eyes only!
12.07.06
WSJ Opinion on “Communist China”
The WSJ Opinion Journal ran a story a little while back about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the one party government that has ruled mainland China since the revolution in 1949, as not truly Communist. Obviously! It hasn’t been ever since Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) uttered these famous words and transformed the Chinese economy:
No matter if it’s a white cat or a black cat;
As long as it catches a mouse
It’s a good cat
Joint Economic Committee report on Chinese Economy
If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend you read the Chairman Jim Saxton’s report to the Joint Economic Committee’s concerning the Chinese economy. You can download the PDF directly from the Congress website.
Non-market lending encouraged the state-owned enterprises and the state-influenced enterprises to invest in too many capital assets and the wrong types of capital assets to produce goods and services to satisfy market demand. The eventual liquidation of the resulting overinvestment or malinvestment poses a significant long-term risk to the continuation of the PRC’s economic growth. Given the PRC’s integration with the global economy, a significant slowdown or recession in the PRC could diminish the prospects for economic growth in the United States and other countries around the world.
There is no question about the misallocation of resources on the ground in China. Whether you’re talking about the vacant high-rise apartment buildings in Pu Dong, the high-rises occupied only on lower floors in Shenzhen and Hangzhou, the 16 terminal airport of Zhuhai that has 2 flights per day (TOTAL!), the hundreds of empty gas stations of Xinjiang, or the millions of other resource misallocatement projects I haven’t seen yet, this is definitely a risk that the CCP needs to address to continue long term GDP growth. You don’t want to turn into another 1990’s Japan…
Economic MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction
I’ve been thinking about the interdependence of China on the US and the US on China for some time now, but I’ve been unable to find the worlds for the model that’s been forming in my head to describe the situation. Until today. This doesn’t totally summarize my thoughts on the situation, but it definitely articulates a lot of my considerations.
The U.S.-centric global speculative financial system continues to operate as a kind of perpetual motion machine, propped up by the “moral hazard” of central bank policies and the willingness of foreign lenders to support U.S. consumption on credit, in order to fund their own economic expansion at home via export income and domestic savings.
The name for this system of interdependence? Economic MAD. The name comes from the Nuclear MAD system that the Americans and the Soviets worked on for much of the 20th century. Catchy name, don’t you think? Go read the original story at iTulip (The Contrary Market View). If course, we know how MAD ends if one player figures out how to cheat…
Note that I believe the iTulip article does cross the line characterizing the CCP as a despot which I totally disagree with. Just because we’re playing MAD, doesn’t mean that one of us is good and one of us is evil, as much as talk like this would irritate our soon to be replaced white house…
12.01.06
Looking for a Postal Code in China
Trying to find the Zipcode for your new address. Well, this morning I was too. I checked my contract on my new apartment. Tried dialing the security guards at the gate. Nobody knew. Turns out you can dial 11185 anywhere in China to lookup the postal code for a given address.
查询邮政编码 11185 (Inquire about Zip Codes)
公交热线 63175522 (Public Transit Hotline)
公安热线 24023456 (Public Security Hotline AKA Police)
There are several more numbers courtesy of the SongJiang’s (Shanghai Suburb) municipal government website. Check it out
