I'm going to assume the irony here is intentional . . .

. . . Allen from over at Fool's Mountain:

I agree with basically everything you said. I think the PRC is really going out of its way to bend backwards for the Taiwanese people by giving Taiwan such a long leash on political autonomy - by implicitly agreeing to attack Taiwan only if Taiwan formally declares independence. Some people just can’t see a good thing even when it is shoved right under their nose!

An amateur's take on the big China bust

Posted this as a comment over at CLB as a reply to gloomy predictions of a 20-30 year slump in the China market from China Vortex's Paul Denlinger, but I thought I'd put it up here as well just so I can look at it a few years down the line and see how much of it is true:

The best way of seeing the effect of a recession in the US/EU on Chinese growth is to look at the effect that previous Euro-American recessions have had on boom economies like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. A review of the period 1971-1991 (that is, covering both the world energy crisis, the recession of the early eighties, and the crash of '87) shows two years in which real per capita GDP declined in western Europe (1974-75, 1980-81), with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand also suffering two periods of decline (1973-75 and 1980-83). In the same period, the Taiwan suffered only one decline (1973-75), South Korean per capita GDP also only saw decline in 1980-81, Japan declined only in 1973-74. What does all this show us? Mainly that while export-led growth economies are sensitive to world economic crises like the oil shortage, they aren't very sensitive to financial crises in the west. In the period 1987-91 Western European per capita GDP grew by only 4.3%, and US GDP grew by only 4.7%, but in the same period Taiwanese per capita GDP grew by 16.2%, Japan by 19% and South Korea by a whopping 36%.

Paul Denlinger's analysis seems to presume that the Chinese economy is especially sensitive to a US slowdown, but I'm not exactly sure why he should think this. The US is actually a smaller market for Chinese exports than the EU, and tighter money is likely to increase sales of cheaply manufactured goods - at least relative to more expensive high-quality goods. China also has big pockets with which the government can make up for any economic slowdown through public spending on infrastructure etc. The only thing that could damage the Chinese economy is greater protectionism in the west (say, a re-play of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs), however the WTO and other trade agreements stand in the way of this.

Put simply, China's exports to the west would continue to increase even if western economies stood still for the next ten years, because these exports are driven mainly by western consumers switching from more expensive sources to cheaper Chinese ones.

Finally, if back in 1978 we had all sat around and tried to suss out how the world economy would be doing in the distant year of 2008, we would surely have gotten a lot of things dead wrong - 30 year predictions aren't worth much.

Xinhua predicts the future, part 2

Having already safely forseen the morning ceremonies on the opening day of the Olympics, Xinhua performs new feats in divining the exact words spoken by China's astronauts in orbit. Amazing!

New year's day . . . .

September has always been the month of change in my life, far more so that the year's end you'll see on a calendar, just as (uber blogger) Andrew Sullivan says, September is the real start of the year. This September has brought it's own changes - last week I started the Common Professional Exam course with an eye towards becoming a solicitor. Patenting was OK but I'm not sure I really wanted to spend the rest of my working life trying to spot differences between different types of hinges, and my lack of a PhD was also holding me back, I always preferred the legal aspects of IP anyway. Let's hope that change really is as good as a rest!

Dear America

What in god's name are you thinking?

Support for the unequivocal position [On banning all torture] was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%). In five countries [only] either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture: Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%).

Goodbye Taipei

I came across this fascinating article written by a GI in the closing days of the US military's prescence on Taiwan via a link from the Taiwan Defence Command blog. Any long time China expat will have come across one of the old timers from the days of Taipei's 'Combat Zone', before Chen Shui Bian came in as mayor and closed down the seedy bars that served the R&R needs of half the US military in Asia. This piece, containing attitudes an opinions common at the time and with which I am not entirely in agreement, goes a long way towards debunking that talk, but it also has a lot in it which will be familiar to any man who has spent a while in Taiwan. Here's a snippet:

Outside the compound, In the side streets between the Napoleon Club and the East Gate, were the bars and massage parlors - here you found the action, as far as Taipei had any action. The memories were made here, stories that will be told 30 years from now. An Oriental bar district is a strange and complicated place, where all things can happen and frequently do, at the same time. It was the playground for single GIs.

The clubs had the same names you see everywhere: Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, the Green Door, Rosie's. The same clubs could be found in Saigon, Hong Kong and along Phatpong Road in Bangkok. Occasionally one will disappear and another pop up in its place - same building, same furniture, but a different name. This is said to be because the police weren't properly bribed.

At three in the afternoon Fletcher and I, in search of a drink, sometimes poked our heads into these dens. Then the clubs were shadowy and empty, with maybe a few exhausted girls sleeping in the booths. They looked like people. But at night they put on their war paint and slinky dresses to become the mysterious beauties of the East - a process much aided by Western imagination. Really they were tired, neurotic girls.

It was fun to walk the district at night, except that Fletcher always sang "Old McDonald" at the top of his voice. Airmen prowled everywhere. The neon glowed and its too bright reds and blues reflected from the dresses of girls who stood in front to lure you Inside. Inside, the decor was air-conditioned Howard Johnson's, with plastic mahogany tables and vinyl upholstery, but sometimes you saw amusing things. Like a visiting senator trying to persuade a lovely young thing how important he was. You also realized quickly that the girls didn't like their work, and usually didn't much like you.

It's also interesting to see some recognisable types from my own time in Taiwan:

Then there was the Taipei of the... well, hippies isn't the right word exactly, because they weren't dirty, didn't use drugs, and didn't think they were three shades brighter than Einstein. But they had beards and faded jeans and lived in the tangled warrens of working class houses near Roosevelt and Ho Ping Roads, downtown.

A Screwy lot. There was an ex-Peace Corps fellow from the Punjab, a tiny Japanese mathematician seeing the world, a crazy Belgian intellectual who spoke Japanese because he had forgotten his native French after five years in Japan, and freelance reporters waiting for the next war. They all spoke Chinese and lived In $20-a-month rooms the size of closets.

Their Taipei was a world of soup stalls, open sewers, nights spent on the rooftops when the heat was too bad, and the landlord's children bringing their friends to see the crazy foreign devils. These curiosities often ate a 3O-cent meal in foodstalls where chow was displayed on pans and tough little workmen wolfed it down. There was fried egg and bean curd cooked a dozen ways, bean sprouts, small rubbery squid like gray vitamin pills, and a few we never did figure out.

They lived by teaching English to bargirls, not a job you'd tell your mother about. At night they squatted on the floor, because they had no chairs and probably no table, and drank Hung Low Joe. It means Red Dew Liquor, an unspeakable rice wine. You come to like it. Then they'd go out singing drunk, speaking six languages, and wander among fruit stalls and short-time hotels no tourist has ever seen. Sometimes, late on a rainy night, you saw them sitting In the island of light around a noodle stand on a deserted street, tossing down Hung Low Joe and chatting with the noodleman.

Read the whole thing if you've got time.

Hua Guofeng

Hua Guofeng, the man who succeeded Mao Zedong as leader of China, carrying on the policies of 'the great helmsman', died today at the age of 87. He was removed from power in 1980 to make way for the great reformer, Deng Xiaoping.

The Times report can be found here.

Thoughts? Will there be a state funeral? Will credit be given to his reforms in allowing foreign loans and sending officials on fact-finding missions to the west? What will be the response of the leadership?

Question:

If, as appears likely in light of today's news, Russia recognises Abkhazia as an independent nation - will the Chinese recognise it as well? I'm guessing not, but it's certainly something worth watching.

The shape of things to come . . . .

I read an interesting opinion piece in the Washington post written by Anne Applebaum yesterday, money quote:

For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC's split-screen coverage of yesterday's Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world's rising powers were strutting their stuff.

Quite. In the one case, we have the rising superpower, which for the time being at least is sticking to its rule of 'not claiming leadership' and of not interfering in other countries affairs, in the other we have the Russian bear slapping down on a rebellious neighbour. The tone of the Russian news reports on channels like Russia Today was striking, with the one-word title "Genocide" being displayed at the bottom of the screen in all their reporting on the conflict. The content of the reports was also remarkable, with interviews with refugees who claimed to have been attacked by men wearing 'US emblems' and reports of the bodies of black soldiers being found touted as 'proof' of US involvement in some of the Russian media. I hardly need to say how unlikely actual direct US involvement is at this stage, but the idea .

We also have examples of how ill-equipped our leaders are to deal with this new world we are entering into - see Lord Owen (he of the Vance-Owen plan) and his comments today in an interview with the BBC where he said that Georgian membership of NATO should be put off as Georgia was geographically 'not contiguous with NATO'. Georgia, of course, shares a border more than 130 miles long with Turkey, a NATO country. Something makes me think that we are all going to have to learn a bit more about where Georgia's borders are.

US moves to end patent outsourcing?

A friend of mine sent me (and the rest of my former colleagues) an email saying this:

. . . you guys are all effectively going to be blocked from working on US-originated inventions, at least without getting special permission from the U.S. Dept of Commerce or U.S. Dept. of State.

Now, this is not related to any new laws, but to the blocking of the export of technology of US origin under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), by which the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has delegated its authority to the USPTO over what technology may or may not be exported. Here's the regulation:

(v) Patent and Trademark Office
(PTO). Regulations administered by
PTO provide for the export to a foreign
country of unclassified technology in
the form of a patent application or an
amendment, modification, or supplement
thereto or division thereof (37
CFR part 5). BIS has delegated authority
under the Export Administration
Act to the PTO to approve exports and
reexports of such technology which is
subject to the EAR. Exports and reexports
of such technology not approved
under PTO regulations must comply
with the EAR.

And if that wasn't clear enough, here's what the USPTO said in an official notice:

The USPTO has become aware that a number of law firms or service provider companies located in foreign countries are sending solicitations to U.S. registered patent practitioners offering their services in connection with the preparation of patent applications to be filed in the United States. Applicants and registered patent practitioners are reminded that the export of subject matter abroad pursuant to a license from the USPTO, such as a foreign filing license, is limited to purposes related to the filing of foreign patent applications. Applicants who are considering exporting subject matter abroad for the preparation of patent applications to be filed in the United States should contact the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the Department of Commerce for the appropriate clearances.

My (completely un-expert and not to be taken as legal advice)take on this? Patent outsourcing is an industry already worth more than 2 billion USD a year, so it's not going to just disappear overnight. My guess is that this will discourage further outsourcing, but that the outsourcing that is already going on will continue. Too much money has already been invested for it not to. Likewise, so many patents have been filed through outsourcing that it would be grotesque for it to be used as a bar on patentability.

China controls weather, predicts future . . .

This post had me chuckling:

Then, at 6.15am, before anything had even happened, we were handed a press release (distributed by the Propaganda Department of Badaling Special Zone Administrative Center.)

"At 6:30 on the morning of August 7th, the Olympic torch motorcade arrived at Badaling Great Wall scenic area. The Great Wall was covered in a holiday-like atmosphere with flags and sounds of gongs everywhere."

The press release went on...

"After the torch-bearer get to the top of the fourth watchtower in the north side and waved the torch at the crowd, 2008 pigeons flew up into the sky, and 2008 balloons were released [...] All the colour-bearers and volunteers were waving their flags and cheering for the completion of the torch relay."

It was slightly curious to read about all of this in the past tense when it hadn't even taken place.

Sevastopol

Check out this video of Navy Day celebrations in the Ukraine-owned Russian-controlled port of Sevastopol. As someone who has always loved the old Soviet videos of weapons being put through their paces (usually with a voice over laden with communist-era jargon) it is great to see the Russians getting back into the swing of things. If, however, you are a fan of world peace and freedom, the idea of such displays of nationalism on the soil of another country is probably going to leave you a little cold, especially given that the Russian lease on the port is due to run out in 2017, and 95% of the population of the port want them to stay despite the Ukrainian government's insistence that they leave.

FOARP V. Italy

That's right, the FOARP has now officially declared war on the nation of Italy. For years they have been oppressing me with their beautiful Lollobrigida, their delicious pizza and their boring 0-0 draws, now Antonio Napoli has pushed me too far!

Well, not actually, but for the record:

1) I can't think of any war that Italy has won since Roman times without outside help, if you know better, tell me.

2) Yes, the Italian team does play incredibly overly defensive football in my view, that makes for boring football.

3) The influence that the Mafia has over Italian politics may be exaggerated, but is not imaginary.

History's most 'badassed' history teacher

I have just discovered the history lectures of Yuan Tengfei (袁腾飞), history's most 'badassed' history teacher (h/t to Tang Buxi of Foolsmountain for the translation of '牛') via Danwei. It's well worth taking a look at his archive if you can speak Chinese, if not Danwei has a subtitled version of one of his speeches.