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Corruption by Communist officials is routinely named in opinion polls as a top source of public discontent, and Hu said the anti-graft fight was the key to "winning or losing public support and the life or death of the party".

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and the Bank Of China itself measures that at least $120 billion has been stolen by corrupt officials since the mid-1990s to overseas destinations, let alone what's been blown on luxuries and mistresses or stashed within China.

The space of the debate seems to me to be between corruption being ridiculous and mind-bogglingly ridiculous

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Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
... its not like being a Russian kleptocracy of where the former intelligence members became oligarchs in the Ukraine ... to say Enron where CEOs made dozens of millions from betting against their company...

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I love the sample space.

Hey, you know that crumbling imperial power, wracked by income inequality, tear gassing protesters, and stuffed with crony capitalists? China may be doing better at corruption than that country. Also, China's doing better than Russia

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
If parents do not want their children to be proselyted to they don't need to send them to those particular schools.

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As for the argument that Chinese children are totally unprepared for religion and then they have it foisted on them at that impressionable age, well to be honest they are being raised in an artificially areligious environment.

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While I strongly disagree with the doctrine many of these schools are surely preaching, I'm not surprised they are having so much success. But the argument that kids are young an impressionable and therefore the religious need to keep their ideas to themselves smacks of not liking the ideas, rather than not liking the mechanism.

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
The government should be able to regulate this sort of thing, and immediately black list schools that are actively lying about the details of their program.

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... if the first wrong were rectified the second would not be occurring.

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Cheaper, more affordable housing could also unlock the savings of China's working-class families, unleashing greater consumer demand and helping to rebalance the global economy. Investment long bottled up in idle real estate could flow to more productive pursuits. These adjustments have been put off too long. This is why at least some of China's leaders appear determined to force a correction despite the risks. But they know they are walking a razor's edge.

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For years analysts have warned of a looming real estate bubble in China, but the predicted downturn, the bursting of that bubble, never occurred -- that is, until now. In a telling scene two months ago, Shanghai property developers started slashing prices on their latest luxury condos by up to one-third. Crowds of owners who had recently bought apartments at full price converged on sales offices throughout the city, demanding refunds. Some angry investors went on a rampage, breaking windows and smashing showrooms.

Shanghai homeowners are hardly the only ones getting nervous. Sudden, steep price reductions are upending real estate markets across China. According to the property agency Homelink, new home prices in Beijing dropped 35 percent in November alone. And the free fall may continue for some time. Centaline, another leading property agency, estimates that developers have built up 22 months' worth of unsold inventory in Beijing and 21 months' worth in Shanghai. Everyone from local landowners to Chinese speculators and international investors are now worrying that these discounts indicate that "the biggest bubble of the century," as it was called earlier this year, has just popped, with serious consequences not only for one of the world's most promising economies -- but internationally as well.

What makes the future look particularly bleak is the lack of escape routes. If Chinese investors panic and rush for the exits, they will discover that in a market awash with developer discounts, buyers are very hard to find. The next three months will be a watershed moment for a Chinese investor class that has been flush with cash for years but lacking a place to put it. Instead of developing a more balanced, consumer-based economy, an entire regime of Beijing technocrats -- drunk on investment-led growth -- let the real estate market run red hot for too long and, when forced to act, lacked the credibility to cool the sector down. That failure threatens to undermine the country's continued economic rise.

Real estate woes are already sending shockwaves through China's broader economy. Chinese steel production -- driven in large part by construction -- is down 15 percent from June, and nearly one-third of Chinese steelmakers are now losing money. Chinese radio reports that half of all real estate agents in the southern city of Shenzhen have closed up shop. According to Centaline, more than 100 local government land auctions failed last month, and land sale revenues in Beijing are down 15 percent this year. Without them, local governments have no way to repay the heavy loans they have taken out to fund ambitious infrastructure projects, or the additional loans they will need to keep driving GDP growth next year.

In a few cities, such as coastal Wenzhou and coal-rich Ordos, the collapse in property prices has sparked a full-blown credit crisis, with reports of ruined businessmen leaping off building rooftops; some are fleeing the country. The central bank's decision on December 5 to lower the reserve requirement ratio for the first time in three years signaled a broader move to pump money into the economy. Beijing has directed banks in Wenzhou to extend emergency loans to troubled borrowers. Of course, officials could halt the sell-off simply by handing developers enough cheap loans to allow them to carry their inventory. But such a strategy risks re-inflating the bubble.

The impact of a housing downturn would have a significant impact globally. International suppliers who have been fueling China's construction boom -- iron-ore miners in Australia and Brazil, copper miners in Chile, lumber mills in Canada and Russia, and multinational equipment makers such as Caterpillar and Komatsu -- could be hard hit. Heavy losses on real estate and related lending could damage investment and consumer confidence, undermining the rising tide of Chinese demand that has been a much-needed growth engine for everything from Boeing airplanes to Volkswagen and GM automobiles to KFC and McDonald's fast food.

Understanding how this came to pass means parsing the host of distortions and mind games that characterize China's real estate market. Residential real estate construction now accounts for nearly ten percent of the country's total GDP -- four percentage points higher than it did at the peak of the U.S. housing bubble in 2005. Bullish analysts have long argued that large-scale urbanization and rapidly rising incomes warrant such an extraordinary boom.

But new urban residents are not the immediate drivers of China's recent run-up in real estate. Chinese investors, large and small, are the ones creating the market. For more than a decade, they have bet on longer-term demand trends by buying up multiple units -- often dozens at a time -- which they then leave empty with the belief that prices will rise. Estimates of such idle holdings range anywhere from 10 million to 65 million homes; no one really knows the exact number, but the visual impression created by vast "ghost" districts, filled with row upon row of uninhabited villas and apartment complexes, leaves one with a sense of investments with, literally, nothing inside.

The craze for vacant real estate is due in large part to a lack of attractive alternatives. Strict controls on capital outflows prevent most Chinese citizens from investing any real money abroad. Chinese bank deposits earn very low interest rates -- lower, for the past year now, than the rate of consumer inflation. The public sees the country's domestic stock exchanges, which have endured volatile ups and downs over the last few years, as little more than high-risk casinos. In contrast, real estate, which has not seen a sustained downturn since China first converted to private homeownership in the 1990s, has long looked like a sure bet.

Beijing's response to the global financial crisis added jet fuel to the fire. To maintain GDP growth of nearly ten percent during a massive downturn in global demand, China's leaders engineered a lending boom that expanded the country's money supply by roughly two-thirds. Real estate was already the preferred place for the Chinese to stash cash; now, investors had that much more cash to stash. Prices rose accordingly: In many locations, the cost of prime new properties doubled in just two years.

But this run of speculation has bid up the price of housing and left people who actually need a place to live in the lurch. Given the prices prevailing earlier this spring, the average wage earner in Beijing would have had to work 36 years to pay for an average home, compared to 18 years in Singapore, 12 in New York, and five in Frankfurt. The bidding war has further pushed developers to build ever more costly luxury properties that investors crave but few ordinary people can afford.

By the spring of 2010, China's leaders were growing increasingly worried that skyrocketing prices were sowing the seeds of social unrest. In response, Beijing imposed a series of cooling measures to rein in speculative demand. These included a stipulation for larger down payments, tougher qualifications for mortgages, residency requirements for home purchasers, and limits on the number of units a family could buy. Although these restrictions were mainly confined to Beijing and Shanghai, where central authorities hold the greatest sway, they were meant to send a clear signal that China's leaders wanted property prices to level off.

Real estate developers, however, believed they had seen this movie before. They had witnessed earlier cooling campaigns, as recently as early 2008. Each lasted a few months before reverting back to business as usual. Local governments depend on a healthy real estate market to generate revenue from land sales (as the state owns the land), and property development has long been a key driver of the GDP growth that the central government both demanded and prized. Let them see the effects of a slowdown, developers figured, and China's leaders would rush back in to support the sector. They always had before.

So the property developers bet against cooling. They continued borrowing and building, even in the face of a relatively soft and uncertain market. Until that point, Chinese developers had been able to move everything they built, usually pre-selling it before it was finished. But starting in the late spring of 2010, they began piling up substantial stocks of unsold inventory, for the day when the government would, so they thought, relent and demand would come surging back.

Because the industry kept on building, there has been no negative impact on GDP. Real estate investment has continued growing at nearly 30 percent annually. But inflation began to rise from 1.5 percent in January 2010 to a peak of 6.5 percent in July 2011, and authorities began to sweat. They broadened their cooling efforts. The central bank tightened credit expansion, and China's economy began to slow. As 2011 progressed, developers scrambled for new lines of financing to keep their overstocked inventories. They first relied on bank loans (until they were cut off), then high-yield bonds in Hong Kong (until the market soured), then private investment vehicles (sponsored by banks as an end run around lending constraints), and finally, in some cases, loan sharks. By the end of last summer, many Chinese developers had run out of options and were forced to begin liquidating inventory. Hence, the price slashing: 30, 40, and even 50 percent discounts.

The biggest unanswered question is whether existing investors -- the people holding all those sold but empty "ghost" condos and villas -- will join in the sell-off, which could turn the market's retreat into a rout. So far, that has not materialized. Unlike highly leveraged developers, most multi-home buyers invested their own money and do not face the same immediate pressures to sell. However, their willingness to hold idle properties depends on real estate's reliability as a store of value -- a rationale that seems to be disintegrating before home buyers' eyes. While pre-owned home prices in Beijing fell only three percent last month, transaction volumes there and in other cities have plummeted (down 50 percent year on year in Shenzhen, 57 percent in Tianjin, and 79 percent in Changsha), suggesting that many owners would like to sell -- so long as it is not at a loss -- but are having trouble finding buyers. Would-be residents, who once felt pressured to buy before prices rose even further, now prefer to wait and look around for a better deal.

In recent weeks, a growing chorus has called on the government to lift restrictions on multiple home purchases -- revealing, when push comes to shove, just how much the market has come to depend on investor, rather than end-user, demand. But both types of demand depend, in their own way, on the assumption of ever-rising prices. Unless that assumption can somehow be restored, neither looser regulation nor looser lending will persuade the Chinese to pile back into property. Just as elsewhere, China's monetary authorities may find themselves, as it's said, pushing on a string of unwilling demand.

Ironically, as Chinese investors start pulling their money out of property, many are putting it into bank- and trust-sponsored "private wealth management" vehicles that promise high fixed rates of return but channel the proceeds into investments -- like real estate developers and local government bonds -- whose returns are themselves predicated on ever rising property prices. Many fear this repackaging of real estate risk is laying the foundation for a follow-on crisis that some are labeling the Chinese equivalent of Wall Street's collateralized-debt-obligation mess.

While frightening, the popping of China's real estate bubble is not all bad news. Cheaper, more affordable housing could also unlock the savings of China's working-class families, unleashing greater consumer demand and helping to rebalance the global economy. Investment long bottled up in idle real estate could flow to more productive pursuits. These adjustments have been put off too long. This is why at least some of China's leaders appear determined to force a correction despite the risks. But they know they are walking a razor's edge.

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The government has been very successful at reducing demand these last two months, I work in Beijing and most of my co-workers are from the surrounding provinces. From what they've said and what I've read, the last three monthss' slowdown has been engineered by the government and mostly aimed at the first tier cities. Their hometowns have no bubbles.

Besides the first tier and parts of Fujian and Guangdong, there's not really much of a bubble. Moody's said as much in their analysis last week, which was "negative" but only focused on first tier ("property prices have not materially declined in most second-tier cities")

I mean, these are huge cities and they represent the interests of the moneyed elite in China, but as a total % of internal domestic demand, they're not very much. It's one thing to write stories about these 'ghost towns', it's another to actually look at % and how much such an image reflects the country as a whole.

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Yep, the foreign press is determined right now to try and divert attention away from all the problems in the US and elsewhere. China housing prices going down you say? Obviously the bubble has popped! But they ignore the fact that the government is forcing the prices down aggressively. Without the controls, housing prices would still be going up. Those controls?

Limits on who can buy housing in the cities (not a resident? gotta have 5 years of stable work history here and history of social insurance payments... and you're only gonna get 1)
Limits on how much people can buy in the cities (no, you can't have an apartment at every new subway station, sorry)
Very high requirements for down payments past the first property (it's effectively 100% now, and no, you can't use funds from your first place to get a loan to pay "cash" for the next one)
And then there's the public housing. 100,000 RMB a year for a family of 3 can get a place for dirt cheap. Way below the market rate. This is effectively 2x city median wage for Beijing.
Property taxes. This will most likely be instituted in 2012 with taxes being owed on everything past a certain amount of square meters.
Taxes that are draconian and evil and target flippers to the point where it's just not profitable in any kind of short term.

All of this will raise rents, or at least it would... if not for all the public housing which will basically end up effing landlords.

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If what you say is true, then it sounds like China's taken sensible choices to prevent a bubble collapse in the future, by making the inflation of a bubble economically non-viable.
The beauty is that it also punishes the effers who inflated the bubble to this point too.

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Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/01/13/harpers-slow-boat-to-china-sets-sail/

Canada stands with America but looks to China.

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I think they'll find that cracking into the Chinese export market for anything other than commodities is notoriously difficult.

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On a rooftop bar in Beijing, a twenty-something sips a raspberry Margarita and dishes the latest dirt on the scandal that has gripped China’s capital, if not most of the country. “I’ve heard the police and the military are supporting two different factions [vying for political power],” she says. “Lots of people who were close to [disgraced former city chief] Bo Xilai are being arrested in Chongqing.” The next evening, a retired party member whispers conspiratorially: “Have you heard? Jiang Zemin has been spending time in Beijing,” referring to the former top leader of China. Jiang lives in Shanghai and, although he retired almost 10 years ago, still is the most powerful player in China’s byzantine politics. “He’s making sure his people are O.K.”

A taxi driver scowls when asked about the intrigue surrounding the upcoming leadership transition and the fate of Bo: “Those who are capable don’t get promoted in China. Those who aren’t, they are the ones who run this country,” he says. “That’s how our system works.” A month earlier, a worried American investment banker called from his office in Shanghai to query a Beijing-based journalist: “I’ve been hearing that there is a coup happening up there and tanks and soldiers are on the street—I know this sounds crazy, but do you see any signs of that at all? My e-mail has been lighting up with worried clients asking about the coup all morning.”

This is what it is like to be living in Beijing in the time of Bo. China is undergoing its biggest political crisis since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as wild supposition mixes with outlandish facts to shift the city’s rumor mill into overdrive. Young Chinese in stylish bars, antsy American investors, civil servants, students, and entrepreneurs all swap stories of political backstabbing and collusion. There’s a feeling of nervous anticipation for what lies ahead. The fact that no one seems to know how things will unfold makes the frisson only stronger.

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What is happening in China is familiar with one exception: the alleged murder of a foreigner. Without that the foreign press would pay little attention. Since Mao's rise to Party power long before the Communist triumph in 1949, inter-Party quarrels at the top level often led the death of the fallen one.

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Generally the developer has to buy out the land usage rights from whoever's on the land first and pay a rather large tax to the government for rights to develop. Yep, it's technically a lease. For how long depends on the zoning.
(1)居住用地70年； - Residential 70 years
(2)工业用地50年； - Industry - 50 years
(3)教育、科技、文化、卫生、体育用地50年； - Educational, cultural, etc - 50 years
(4)商业、旅游、娱乐用地40年； - Business, tourism, entertainment - 40 years
(5)综合或者其他用地50年 - Combined and other purposes - 50 years

What happens after that period of time is still anyone's guess. Most likely it will mean paying a transfer tax to renew the lease. Odds are more likely that within that time span it will be targeted for a buyout and compensation for redevelopment prior to theexpiry date.

The definition of "development" was kinda vague before and it wasn't uncommon for a developer to just dig a small pit, or hire a handful of workers to pretend development was happening. Yummy land speculation. Buy it cheap, squat on it for a few years and then start to actually do something. The pre-sales thing also used to be possible, as was using an existing property as collateral for downpayment on new properties. That all changed.
Sales cannot happen until development reaches a certain point now, generally speaking it typically starts up once at least the shell of the building is all done and in place. Developers also tend to prefer mortgages to be coming in from a specific bank which they are working with. Funds from those banks are released piecemeal at various stages of development. The downpayments typically do straight into their pockets, which is why they'll give discounts for paying cash in full. That's more or less the only way pre-sales can happen anymore. Highly reputable developers with a long established history might give pre-sales of cash-in-full with around a 7~9% discount. Not so reputable developers where there is an obvious risk... it's not uncommon to see very early pre-sales of units with a 20~30% discount, but now, even that is still restricted. Development must be authorized by the government for pre-sales prior to actually being sold and this has become rather well regulated... at least in the hottest property markets.

Developer goes bankrupt halfway through and runs away? Assets get auctioned off to a new developer for cheap. They can either finish up the building and claim the funds remaining from bank mortgages as well as all the other perks, or they can tear it all down and compensate buyers. Most people who are not huge risk takers will only buy from very reputable developers who have a long history. The new restrictions specifically make it difficult for developers who don't have all that much actual capital. And yes, this industry is stupidly corrupt as there is huge money to be made. Getting cleaned up a bit recently, but still corrupt.

Taxes to the government are paid when property changes hands from the developer to the buyer. This must be in cash, and no, loans or other collateral is not allowed to pay for it. Back during the bubble there was also rampant speculation where buyers would line up and gobble up the pre-sales at huge discounts, paying cash in full before anything was actually built. Then as development got underway it wouldn't be uncommon to see those rights to future units being flipped at various stages of development for quick profits. That all kinda came to an end with the 5-year taxation policy. If you hold it for under 5 years, you get whacked with massive tax penalties now. That was one of the first regulations that was put in place, but the market was still so hot that it had virtually zero effect.

I'm not even going to bother to get into the disturbingly cheap places that have questionable land rights. That's a whole nother topic. But one of the funny things that's happened is the golf course implosion. Percentage of "green space" became the new hype. Taking a section of the development and turning it into a small park or whatever, or filling the parking lot with trees became a fairly standard way to boost that number on paper. Having green space was also one of those stats that local governments were graded on. So, when that whole "develop it or lose it" thing came to pass, a really common trick was to take a large plot that they wanted to speculate on, transfer it to a shell company, put in the underlying infrastructure (water mains, electric, sewage, etc) and then fill it with a bunch of trees (which can be dug up and sold for a profit later) or turn it into a golf course (which is actually a huge money maker and a great graft tool). When the day comes that they actually want to develop it, the shell goes bankrupt, the parent takes it back over, pays some tax to restart the lease and up go the buildings. In the meantime, adjacent developments can have inflated "green space" and the local government can boast about their parks and overall green space. Parks don't get bitched about, golf courses sometimes do, but the profits from the golf courses make the fines laughable. This land can also be used to secure future development loans for other properties.

The notion of ever-increasing prices is highly linked to improved development. remote locations get a subway station, or have a station planned. Prices shoot up. If perchance it's on top of a subway interchange station, prices shoot up even higher. Just the way it goes, and this is probably connected to the design of the subway system itself with it's lack of massive hub stations. The surrounding real estate would just be obscene.

Current restrictions in place (in Beijing):

Downpayments & Financing (These put a major damper on, but did not stop all growth)
1st unit - can used housing fund loans up to 80w and bank loans for the rest. Absolute minimum downpayment is 20% on the housing fund and 30% or higher for the rest of it.
2nd unit - 60% minimum, 100% preferred (might actually be a required 100% now, I would have to double check)
3rd unit - 100%, no other option, must be cash in full, also unlikely to be allowed.
It's also fairly difficult to get fixed rate mortgages, most are variable and those rates are entirely controlled by the government.

Purchasing (these are the biggies that finally started the deflation)
Typically restricted to a single unit in the city, potentially a second or third, but it typically requires some scheming to pull off.
Non-local hukou must have a 5-year history of a stable job, paying taxes, contribution to social insurances before being eligible for a single unit.
Foreigners limited to a single unit within China. It must be a primary residence and cannot be rented out. Must reside for at least 1 year prior to being allowed to purchase.
Foreign interests and speculators are effectively banned.

Construction
Stand alone villa construction is banned on all new developments
Pushing from the government for economic housing of reasonable sizes

Future things that will be or are in the process of happening:
Property Taxes!
It's a quota-based system. Each member of a family unit is allocated a certain amount of square floorage that is tax-free. Beyond that, taxes will be owed on the remaining sum of space taking into account all properties with a bias towards counting the floor space in the properties of highest value towards the quota first.
For the vast majority of people, this will never be a concern as the base line is rather high. It's pretty much just a tax on the rich and landlords (who are skirting rental income taxes anyways).

"Low-income" housing explosion
It was attempted before, there was corruption, end result was a bunch of rich people snapping it all up via various means. The new stuff is much more thorough in terms of qualifications and they simply cannot flip it for 10 or more years. This housing is aimed at new graduates and will be highly affordable either as purchases or as income-sensitive rentals with purchase options. Migrant workers more likely than not will not have any access to this prior to meeting a series of rather rigorous qualifications.


Do keep in mind that these are Beijing regulations and the ones I am most familiar with. Pretty much all other cities have their own regulations which vary according to how they see fit. But Beijing was one of the craziest places during the bubble. Most cities seem to ban outsiders from purchasing anything as well as slapping restrictions on how many units they are allowed to purchase. How strict this is, really does depend on their own regulations. For a place like Xi'an, I know there must be proof of 1 year of payments to the local social insurance scheme and/or a 1 year record of local taxation.

Goals for the Government:
Smack the **** out of housing prices. This was becoming a huge problem for everyone who wasn't rich and was causing some serious problems.
Stabilize housing prices. Way too ****ing volatile before. Gots to keep a lid on that.
Kill off the crappier developers. Prior to about 1980, it was all state owned, workers were generally well trained, standards were higher. With the privatization and opening to private developers standards have gone down and there are higher risks from developers who really have no business being in the game to begin with. Government wants this to be more consolidated into large reputable companies that are more easily regulated.

With all the regulations in place, if the decline is too fast, they can ease up, if it overshoots the targets they can introduce incentives. It's all very controlled and not in any way some kind of crisis like the overseas media is pretending. Economists are also fairly useless to listen to about this, as their theories only really work in unregulated markets... all kinda gets shot to hell when it's central government pulling the strings. Mortgages here are not being bundled up and passed off to investors with fake ratings. No such thing as 0% down, liar loans or non-recourse (however policy is very lenient to primary residences in hard times who are temporarily incapable of repayment). No teaser interests and balloon payments, ARMs or resets. The major banks are all effectively state-owned and controlled and have government backing. HELOC exists, is limited to 70% LTV and generally is only really possible once the original mortgage has been paid off in full. Using a primary residence to do this is basically a risk no one in their right minds would ever take.

The culture here is highly geared to settle all debts asap and the first thing on everyone's mind isn't "how much per month" but rather "how much total in the end". If it means working a side-job, or starting up a small business... if there is a mortgage to pay, I can pretty much guarantee that every last fen of extra income will be going towards paying off the loan faster.


edit: Furthermore, due to the restrictions in China, you are seeing the outflow of hot money to markets pretty much everywhere else to snap up properties as investment. Any laxing of the regulations pretty much ensures cash flies right back into the markets here. There's tons of demand and those buyers generally represent zero credit risk as they pay in cash.

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Is it just me, or is the American media's reporting of the Chen Guangcheng affair hopelessly stupid? Most outlets seem to be treating it as if Chen requested asylum and was denied and thrown under a bus, when State tells a very different story and Chen doesn't seem to be able to keep his story straight. There was only that one quote from the State Dept. guy who seems to understand something about the situation saying something like "we have a fragile deal with the state police and Chen is threatening it with his weird comments" but I don't hear the media even attempt to deal with analysis of that or any kind. They also are quite focused on how this reflects on OBAMA but what can you expect in an election year.

There is zero interest it seems in the motives and interests of and constraints on the relevant parties or any attempt to analyze what might happen next. They just seem to have a canned narrative, fake outrage from Americans who won't recognize Chen's name next week, and no real understanding of the situation.

I guess it doesn't help that the American government's treatment of the situation is almost willfully stupid, like trying to pass a Congressional resolution to give the guy asylum when, again, he hasn't requested it. The only thing keeping this guy from disappearing is U.S. diplomatic pressure and the fear of public embarrassment, and backroom deals to save face like the "study abroad" deal currently being floated is the only way Chen is getting anything positive out of this situation. I really feel for the State Department here sort of being the only adult in the room on this issue.

But the media sure isn't helping.

edit: the WaPo articles were good. I guess I should say television news, since those are the outlets I have specifically seen being offensively dumb.

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The majority of the "modern" era dissidents are the disenfranchised non-Han minority in most cases. There are exceptions like Chen but the ones making the most noise are usually still ethnic minorities. Overseas Chinese back in the early 19th century were the fairly well off mercantile class of southern Chinese who were exiled for mostly economic reasons. There was a direct Han connection to the mainland so it was easy to foment revolution. On the other hand the non ethnic Han minorities might be able to stir up movements within their own community in the mainland but it's a drop in the proverbial ocean of people in China without Han support.


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To some extent China already doesn't really care if its citizens leave. It's not east Germany or anything. It's pretty easy for most Chinese citizens to leave to go live abroad if they have the economic means.

The problem is there aren't many countries out there that would want the type of people China would want to deport anyways. Activists always shed crocodile tears over Uighurs and such but do people really want potential islamic fundamentalists living in their country? Same goes for Falun Gong cultists or large impoverished populations of Tibetans.

I'm sure China would be thrilled to offload them to the U.S. But realistically they can't. That leaves a few high profile guys really.

It would be an interesting scenario if China tried to engineer a demographic time bomb by just opening up the borders to India and allowed Tibetans a one way trip. I imagine you'd end up with a situation like Castro's Cuba. A lot of prisons would "mysteriously" empty over night sending actual criminals out of the country too.

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
Let's hope Chen ends up being a Sun Yat Sen. Returning to China triumphantly ready to lead a new reform minded movement after directing in exile.

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Originally posted by Mucus:

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
Let's hope Chen ends up being a Sun Yat Sen. Returning to China triumphantly ready to lead a new reform minded movement after directing in exile.

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Let's hope he doesn't and that he actually does a lot better. The Sun Yat Sen story leads to a whole lot more tragedy than triumph in the end.

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