xiaohongshu [none/use name]

It is illegal but enforcement is very lax, because of the way the revenue structure works in China.

Value-added tax forms the major tax base of both the central and local governments, and so the economy is already predisposed to be reliant on those companies to generate as much revenue as they can. Strict enforcement means lower output, less revenues and less tax revenues for the governments to spend on public utilities. That’s not the only reason though and we can write an entire essay on it.

If China wants to stop this behavior, then a complete revamp of its fiscal and monetary systems will be needed.

Ironically, it is the foreign companies like Apple and Tesla that are most compliant to Chinese regulations and give the best salary and benefits, because they don’t want to infringe on Chinese labor laws and risk having their access to the Chinese market revoked. On the other hand, Huawei, the darling of Hexbear, is well known for giving zero day of annual paid leave. ZERO.

That’s the cost of getting cheap goods.

The US has stopped developing its uranium extraction industry following the Lisbon Protocol because Russia can supply tons of cheap uranium by dismantling their huge stockpile of nuclear warheads.

As a result, even with the Russia-Ukraine war going on and unprecedented Western sanctions against Russia, the US still continues to import uranium from Russia!

Having said that, I don’t think there will ever be a hot war with China. The post-1991 US military industrial complex is all about grifting and profit. The US is not under threat as long as it has nukes.

And the wars it sponsored are more about creating chaos and destabilization to reshape regional politics and economy to its interests rather than conquering land. And having an advanced enemy like during the Soviet times means trillions of dollars more funding for the military industrial complex and completes the loop of perpetual grifting for the defense contractors.

This guy talks a lot about Petrodollar nonsense and how China’s going to create their own dollar-denominated financial system to kill the US dollar lol. I don’t even know how these people can be taken seriously, but apparently it is quite easy to gather a following on Youtube and social media if you say what people want to hear.

Rhetoric is useless. The fact is that Iran gives some of the best maternity benefits in the world. That’s what matters.

Better than the Democrats who told you how much they support women’s rights for sure.

Mofcom says they are currently accelerating the examination process to approve export permits for rare earth materials. I believe that they are exporting for civilian use but not military, but I’m not sure how they can track the usage once they have reached the other end.

China absolutely has the capacity to do that, but they probably won’t though.

Don’t write China off yet. As I have been saying, if China threatens to stop the global economy, the conflict WILL end before Monday. There is nothing the US can do about it except to watch Wall Street stock market crash when it opens, should they refuse to a truce.

I thought about this a lot: even assuming Putin is not a lib and has the political will to do so, is it even achievable without causing more disturbance to the country?

I struggle to think of a single example where liberal influence can be eliminated without doing a Stalin style purge. In fact, even Stalin failed to purge the libs, as they returned to power under Khrushchev immediately after his death.

It is easy to think, hey, why don’t we just purge all the libs and push the socialism button, but these people control many important parts of the country and can easily blow up the economy if you’re not careful. Let us not forget that even Stalin’s purge was extremely turbulent and many innocent people got caught up in it. Putin is not Stalin, far from it. He is too soft to do that kind of purge.

Just look at Xi Jinping - all it took was for one city to sabotage the entire Zero Covid policy, and now he’s forced to bow to the private capital and re-admitted Jack Ma - whom he purged not so long ago - back to the highest echelon of the elite circle. The libs have practically won the battle in China as well (although I’ll admit that Xi himself is far more moderate than many people give him credit for, if you actually look at the history of his entire career. I don’t mention this often because people really don’t like to hear this).

Saw that coming months ago when I said that the libs are back in charge and the Cabinet of Ministers have already fought and lost the battle against the libs. People here didn’t believe me.

How’s that 20% interest rate going?

Because, as you’d have noticed, when the Fed raised its key rate, the central banks of many other countries would also follow to prevent capital outflows.

The central bank sets the lending rate that commercial banks try to match. If the central bank does not target a rate, then competition between banks to lend out their excess reserves will quickly cause the interest rate to fall to 0% (which can be a good or a bad thing depending on your perspective/economic doctrine).

If the Fed lowers key rate as inflation goes down, then China’s central bank can also cut its rate, then other commercial banks can follow, and local governments will now be able to borrow cheaper to pay back their higher interest overhanging debt.

I don’t follow. Local governments borrowed in yuan. How can the dollar save them?

The only way is for the Chinese government to print the money (in yuan) to pay them off, or to force the banks to write off the bad debt. But we’re talking tens of trillions of yuan of debt here, possibly way more than that. The scale of which is no longer known (maybe even not to the central government themselves) because so much of the debt were hidden through shadow banks.

Not wanting millions of innocent people to die in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world is not a good enough reason for you?

Why must everything be thought of in a 100-year plan for China? You realize there are people living outside China today that are likely going to have their lives upended if Trump does anything crazy?

China had a plan 10 years ago, then Covid happened, and everything went off the rails.

You were making conspiracy theories that Biden/Ukraine were desperate so they would nuke/false flag the Paris Olympics.

I said that it is not out of possibility that strategy of tension will be brought back to Europe to ensure US dominance over the region. Gladio was a very real conspiracy that only went away with the formation of the EU following the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. Now that the EU is fragmenting we should not be surprised to see a new Gladio reemerging in Europe.

I swear that people forget Europe wasn’t always as peaceful as it appears today when you look at the 1960s-80s. I highly recommend looking up the history of Gladio if you think what I said was crazy.

Trump gave us the opportunity to make the US weaker and “we” didn’t take it.

Trump didn’t make the US weak, at least not yet so far. The US weakness was fully exposed at the start of the Ukraine war under Biden, when the Fed hiked interest rates in response to the inflation caused by disruption of oil and supply chain (and amplified by the pandemic just before that).

That window of opportunity had already passed and none of Trump’s second term policies even approached exposing the weakness of the US like Biden’s policies did back in 2022. If anything, Trump is only allowed to enact his absurd policies precisely because none of the countries seriously challenged US hegemony following the Ukraine war, and the US has quite correctly calculated that China does not have the incentives to jeopardize the dollar hegemony.

Like, I remind you that many countries were genuinely looking to flee the dollar zone months immediately after the US confiscated $300 billion of Russia’s dollar reserves. Few countries are going to do that today - the global tariffs simply aren’t a strong incentive for the countries to leave the dollar zone. After all, if you’re an exporting country, who else are you going to sell to?

Increasing instability means high risks of war. What do you think countries do when they run out of fuel or food because of disruption of the global trade, or deterioration of material conditions due to regional destabilization caused by American foreign policy?

But the US has the entire world under its thumb via the USD.

Again, think in terms of contradictions. The hegemony of USD also caused massive trade deficits, large scale deindustrialization and growing dissent among its working class as jobs were exported to the Global South. The global financial crisis of 2008 further devastated the real economy and exacerbated the deterioration of material wealth of the lower/middle class, and directly precipitated the rise of populism in the form of Sanders and Trump in the 2016 election. None of this was a coincidence.

What the American capital has been doing since the first Trump term, including his first trade war with China in 2018, was an attempt to resolve these very contradictions that are inherent within the American capitalist system. Funnily enough, it is actually much easier to understand the geopolitical play when viewed through such Marxist lens, in terms of contradictions, than to see the present geopolitical conflicts as some kind of competition between US-China, NATO-Russia, US-Israel-Iran etc.

That doesn’t mean the US will always get its way. The politics and economy of the world is simply too complex to be accurately calculated and predicted. Just like how the US and Japan both miscalculated the Plaza Accord, and both countries ended up not getting what they had hoped to achieve, though the outcome still favored the US in the end. The same will happen with US and other countries like China, Russia moving forward - nobody could predict how the current policies will actually play out in the future. But it certainly won’t stop the US from attempting to play a maximalist strategy with all the advantages it still has, and for other countries to respond in kind.

Yes, if the tariffs are causing inflation to go up, then the Fed will not cut rate or even raise it again.

This is why it is in China’s interest to see the inflation goes down in the US, if they want the Fed to cut rate. And that involves working out a compromise with the Trump team to make sure that the treats don’t get too expensive for the American consumers.

Fed holds key rate steady, still sees two more cuts this year CNBC

The Federal Reserve kept its key borrowing rate targeted in a range between 4.25%-4.5%, where it has been since December.

However, the central bank expects inflation to remain elevated and sees lower economic growth ahead.

Still, the Federal Open Market Committee expects to make two rate reductions later this year, according to the closely watched “dot plot.”

The Fed still refused to cut rate, once again citing “inflation risks” even though inflation has dropped to 2.7%. This is bad news for China’s local governments who need the Fed rate cut to alleviate their debt burden.

I had previously expected the recent US-China negotiation to have at least involved a small rate cut as a sign of good will, but it looks like the US-China talk is far from over.

Harris would have pulled the trigger with 0 hesitation.

That’s literally what I said - consistency. I already mentioned that even Putin said that he preferred Biden to Trump because at least Biden’s foreign policy was consistent. And this makes it possible to formulate a plan to deter or to dissuade the other side from going through.

The problem with Trump is that his decision swings from one end of the spectrum to another, based on something that is likely not tangible. This unpredictability amplifies the risks of global instability, because you can no longer predict what he wants.

You could say the wrong thing just because it’s in the morning and not the afternoon, and that’s it for someone who has the authority to launch nukes. When countries cannot predict what the US wants, bad decisions can easily lead to other bad decisions and eventually reaching the point of no return for the all of us.

ICE is literally kidnapping people off the streets and throw them into “detention centers”. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen under the Democrats but let’s not pretend like they are happening on the same scale, or that the fascist thugs aren’t being emboldened by Trump.

It may be easy for an American-born citizen to say “it’s all the same” but for many immigrants in America, this is already causing a lot of undue stress and panic on top of feeling that the society has turned hostile against them.

We are also seeing increasing assault - quite openly - against LGBT and minority rights and while I cannot speak for them, I can imagine that many would prefer not to live in fear like that under Trump.

You are right though that both parties are two sides of the same coin in foreign policy, but as I mentioned in my initial comment, the unpredictability of Trump is what makes him so dangerous for the world. Biden/Harris at least have a level of consistency. When other countries cannot predict what America wants, it risks destabilizing the entire world and things can spiral out of control easily.

That’s a very uncharitable read of my argument.

I said that if the US left is not prepared for the struggle, including through an armed struggle, then it’s objectively better to have a Biden/Harris administration to buy a few more years of time while building up a resilient movement in the meantime.

People here somehow wanted an accelerationist scenario with Trump but what has transpired instead is that Trump is letting his fascist thugs to deport immigrants, assault on progressive and civil rights left and right, provoking even more deranged foreign policy on Gaza and Iran, and guess what? There has been no meaningful opposition just as I predicted while fascists are roaming the streets doing what they want. The American left literally does not have a strategy to counter Trump fascism.

The keyword here is pragmatism. This was what the Chinese communists understood, but the American left doesn’t. They had to work with the nationalists to kick out the Japanese invaders, even after just experienced a huge massacre by the KMT. Can you imagine if the communists were too idealistic and vindictive to work with the KMT? Japan would have carved up China and communism would not have prevailed in the end.

Having some perspective matters. Take this from a country where communism actually won.

Look there is no point getting angry about this at this moment. We literally have Trump on the brink of pulling the trigger. The nightmare scenario that has haunted me since before the election is already happening.