China is Headed for an Economic Collapse

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As a news junkie, I've been following the story about China's rapidly declining economy. That country has a lot of financial problems.

As far as I can tell, the problems began with an over leveraged real estate investment market. At one time, real estate was so lucrative that developers were selling properties that hadn't even been built. Since there were billions of dollars to be made in this industry, instead of using sales to complete a given high rise condo, the developers used this money to acquire new properties and to begin new construction. The problem with this is that they never bothered finishing their old projects. Stories abound of how five years on, some home buyers were having to pay mortgages for properties that were never completed.

As if this wasn't bad enough, in an effort to squeeze more money out of their developments, these developers began using substandard materials. If you search on YouTube for "tofu dreg projects", you will find stories videos about how people in these apartments have found that they can grab the edge of a wall and literally have it crumble in their hands.

Since in theory there are supposed to be financial controls in place to avoid over leveraging (which occurs when a business has borrowed too much money and is unable to make interest payments), banks got around this law by creating "shadow banks". These were financial institutions that acted like banks but were referred to by other names like institutions, consortiums, or trusts.

Just as there were greedy people who dominated the real estate market, there were equally greedy bankers. At some point, someone began embezzling accounts. Hundreds of thousands of people with bank accounts suddenly found that their debit cards no longer worked. When they went online to access their accounts, they found that their accounts were frozen.

Although China is supposed to have a banking insurance program that's similar to what we have here in the States, so that if you money were to ever disappear, the U.S. government would restore your missing funds for amounts up to $250,000, for reasons unknown, the Chinese government never did this.

When account holders protested, they were literally beaten up by the police.

Not only did greed and corruption permeate real estate and banking but it also extended into retail production. By way of example, last year I ordered a pair of cheap trousers through Amazon from China that were sized 2X. When I got the trousers, they were more like 10X.

A camcorder that I ordered didn't work. A belt I bought literally snapped in half when I pulled it around my waist. Although it had been advertised as having been made out of leather, it felt more like cardboard. All of these items were returned to Amazon for a refund.

I am not the only person who has had these problems. After trade sanctions kicked in, Russia turned to its southern neighbor to buy cars since there were no longer any foreign imports. The Chinese cars have literally fallen apart or have caught fire. If you've been following the news regarding the war in Ukraine, Chinese tires on Russian military vehicles have gone flat.

2023 trade shows in China saw attendance by foreign wholesale purchasers drop by 90% or more. Since the U.S. used to be China's largest market, the loss of this business hurt the retail sectors. Hundreds of thousands of employees have been laid off.

Worse yet are the flight of foreign corporations. Apple, Dell, Mazda, Walmart, Nike, Adidas and Samsung (to name but a few) are leaving or have left due to issues with changing Chinese regulatory practices and copyright violations. These closures have led to more layoffs.

Things have gotten so bad that there are government employees like teachers and police officers who have now gone for months without having received a paycheck. Since government regulations say that anyone who is laid off is supposed to receive severance pay, the government has "gotten around this" by furloughing employees or not paying them.

Alibaba, China's "Amazon" just laid off 20,000 employees.

As you might imagine, all of this economic downturn has had a cascading effect within China. When people don't have money to spend, they don't go out to eat. They don't go clubbing. They don't buy retail goods. Shopping malls are now empty. Tens of thousands of restaurants have gone out of business, leaving even more people unemployed.

On December 5th, Moody's downrated China's credit to a negative rating.

I find myself wondering if the Communist government will be able to survive the growing financial crisis. I also wonder how insulated the Communist leadership is from what's happening within their country. Unemployment in China is at a record high. Millions have lost their life savings. Millions more own properties that are completely worthless.

Historically, Chinese Emperors who have fallen out of touch with what's been happening to their people, have been overthrown whenever things have gotten so financially bleak. Although China is now run by the Communist Party, in terms of form and function, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the old Imperial functionaries and the current CCP. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I only hope that if the government does collapse, that the UN will be more proactive than they were when the Soviet Union collapsed. Part of the reason why the oligarchs of the current Russian Federation were able to seize so much power in Russia was because they were operating in a power vacuum with little or no opposition.

There’s gotta be some nerds amongst their Billion+ population that can figure out what to do next. China’s been around a long time and will continue. It just might change after this most recent financial house of cards starting to come crashing down is all.

its should really be concerned about

It won’t just be China, btw. Much of the world is headed for economic ruin. We’re all pretty interconnected these days and we’ve all been playing stupid games with money and real estate.

Canada’s economy is slowing down. There are ever more people seeking work/additional work to try to keep afloat. And this is just the beginning of the slow down. With housing costs in the stratosphere, interest rates up, and the economy slowing.. it’s the perfect storm for s**t to hit the fan.

USA isn’t going to escape unscathed, either. Their home prices are 40% lower, but their money printing presses have been running around the clock over the last few years.. I heard in some little viral vid that something like 90% of all US dollars in existence have been printed since 2020. If true, how can that not possibly devalue the USD?


Smarter people than all of us at levels higher than federal governments anywhere in the world know what’s up. I very highly doubt any of this, or other things, are happening by mere chance. It’s been designed and engineered and whatever repercussions & fallout we all experience for it is as it’s intended to be by people far more powerful than any of us can fathom. There’s far too much knowledge, data, and information available these days for systemic collapses to just “happen,” IMO. Someone set the dominoes up & knocked them over.

One advantage for the Chinese government is it has a centralised economy which is under government control, they can make necessary policy changes without the need for passage of bills getting blocked by a hostile parliament or congress.

They can also simply just disappear a whole lot of excess citizens if they feel the need and they’d block knowledge of their none-child policy from the outside world..

Collapse or not, I'd take Xi Jinping over Donald Trump or Greg Abbott any day of the week.

So you would choose a dictator commiting active genocide against an ethnic minority?

Xi has never:

Called an entire group of people "drug dealers and rapists"

Bragged about grabbing people by the p***y

Demanded a wall be built at another country's expense

Ordered supporters to storm government buildings in Beijing

Suggested bleach, hydroxichloroquine or ivermectin to treat COVID

Banned abortion without exception for rape or incest, and ordered women with life-threatening complications to carry the fetus to term.

Allowed unfettered gun access, open carry, etc (This is why there are no mass shootings in China)

Banned drag shows

Banned gender-affirming health care

Advocated for teaching things like abstinence-only sex education, "don't say gay", flat earth theory and creationism.

Suggested that China is a "Christian (or Muslim) nation"

Privatized the power grid, let it go to crap, and let 200 people freeze to death.

Banned marijuana, for the purpose of throwing more people of color in jail

Said things like "When the looting starts, the shooting starts"

He's accused all Uyghurs of being terrorists and had them sent to concentration camps which the whole world refused to condemn and it quietly got swept under the rug.





Uyghur women have been forcibly neutered and raped/molested by Chinese officers. Also China has always had a poor track record in how it treats their own women.

umm The Great Wall of China? They beat us to that idea centuries ago.

You obviously don't know Chinese history or how Mao commanded his "red army" of young Communist sympathizers to violently attack and murder anyone in China who didnt support Mao. Xi's on father was a victim of this and yet he supports the same Draconian tacticts Mao uses, which is why China is starting to collapse again.[/quote]

He had a doctor in his country locked away in prison for trying to warn the world about the Covid pandemic and this doctor died in custody. He also tried to blame Americans for the origins of Covid when everyone outside of China knew it was reported in his country first.



Dude, your talking about a country that forces abortion on women under their draconian one child/two child policy. That's not exactly pleasant as abortion should be about a woman's choice.



Except when the military and the police use tanks to violently crush down protestors who get tired of China's BS and then insist that that these things "never happened".



China is starting to crack down on LGBTQ rights



I find that hard to believe



They don't teach the last two things because its a dominantly atheist/buddhist country.

But your other two points are completely idiotic and show just how naive you are about how China does things. China for years forced their citizens to cut down on sexual procreation and once again they are against or at least indifferent towards LGBTQ rights.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_China

"Today, the government's approach to LGBT rights has been described as "ambivalent", "fickle", and as being "no approval; no disapproval; no promotion".[8][9] There is much resistance from conservative elements of the government, as various LGBT events have been banned in recent years.[9] Since the late 2010s, authorities have avoided showing homosexual relationships on public television, as well as showing effeminate men in general.[10][11]"

[quote[Suggested that China is a "Christian (or Muslim) nation"[/quote] That means nothing to me. I'd rather live in a country with religious freedom over one commiting genocide on certain religious people like they've done in Tibet and are currently doing in Xinjiang



As opposed to allowing their own people to starve to death while being trapped in their own homes during the Covid pandemic which the CCP refused to accept any responsibility for and tried to cover up?



I don't know what the penalties are for weed but China is a country that executed people for smuggling narcotics. Also weed for the most part is still illegal in their country.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_China



I'm sure they're too busy crushing peaceful protestors with tanks.

You need to get real about the kind of country China is. They're not a better alternative to the West in any way. But I get the feeling I'm wasting my energy trying to explain the reality to you.

I wanted to say something but couldn't. Hope for world peace, democracy, unity and common progress.

Funny that you should mention that. Trump himself might even AGREE with you!

Trump himself is a big fan of Xi,( and Kim, and Putin, and Durarte of the Phillipines). And he looks up to them as his own authoritarian role models. And he has never made a secret of it.


https://youtu.be/UWvmBGZzd8c

The point is that in the U.S., conservatism needs to be criminalized.

Given first amendment rights to free speech, this is not a realistic goal.

What is a realistic goal is enforcing the 14th amendment which says that anyone who has previously sworn an oath of office to serve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution and who then engages in an insurrection against the United States, will be ineligible for any elected higher office.

After many years of economic success, that must be very hard on them. I wouldn't be surprised if Canada is headed in the same direction.