Classic China. In this government controlled Chinese press is this report:
Shandong Baoya Vehicle Co., Ltd. received orders from the US this year for the purchase of 4,800 electric cars.
Baoya electric car possesses its own core technologies including driveline technology for the chassis of electric cars, as well as adaptation and optimization technologies for drive motors, according to Zhang Haibo, Baoya's General Manager.
"At present, all our products are for export. In 2008, 500 cars were exported to the US, and orders from the US this year have already reached 4,800 units." Zhang said.
The Baoya electric car fully meets western countries' weight criteria, a maximum of 400 kilograms for low-speed sedans, and has a top speed of 80 kilometers per hour. The Baoya electric car requires five to eight hours to be recharged, with a cost of approximately 30 yuan per recharge, on which the car is able to run 150 kilometers. These electric cars for export are priced between 30,000 yuan and 35,000 yuan.
Let me translate this for you. These electric cars:
- top speed: 50 MPH
- top miles per charge: 93 Miles
- cost per 93 miles: $4.385
- charge cost per mile: 5.2¢
- Price of the car: $5,116.59
Green jobs will save the United States economy? Anyone realize when one gives away their entire manufacturing base and has biased trade agreements, other nations see the same opportunity?
GM's VOLT hybrid, projected for release in ,is $40,000 dollars. Now the Volt is by far superior, more versatile, but look at the price tag.
Roubini On China
"I have to give credit to the Chinese. Their fiscal stimulus will contain the degree of economic contraction. But China is radically dependent on U.S. growth. Forcing state-owned enterprises and banks to spend more when you have overcapacity, or to lend more when there are already large [amounts of bad debt], is going to postpone a problem, maybe by a few months. But it will lead to a harder fall down the line. A hard landing is unavoidable, given what has happened to the rest of the world."
--Nouriel Roubini
The Chinese fiscal stimulus is going to be
somewhat more complex than it looks at first glance.
First, so as not to drain the central governments hard currency reserves, largely dollars, it is planned to be implemented primarily through provincial and local governments. AFAIK, these are basically unfunded mandates.
Second, a large part of that money is go to bring what had become private business back under the control of the state. This spending isn't random, and looks an awful lot like an effort to shore up the industrial base needed to make war. For example the proposed purchase of Hummer by Dongfeng would eliminate dependence on imports of the chassis and engine of Chinese military vehicles from the United States.
Is China building up it's war machine?
Seems to me they are building up their economic war machine to dominate the globe and most assuredly Asia, but does that include military conquest at a later date?
Its sort of complex
you have to remember that China is two things: 1) a nation full of people, and 2) a state controlled by the Communist party.
As bad as the economic crisis has hit us, its quite worse in China. The government is afraid, with reason, that they've lost the trust of the people, and that the rage at having been exploited and then screwed out of a check is going to shift from the employer, specifically, to the government's management of the crisis.
That leaves the leadership few options. You can kill people like Tianamen, but that only works in small doses without undermining the functioning of the economy.
The second option is to deflect the anger being directed at the government into a nationalism that blames the countries problems on other countries. And that replaces legitimation by economic growth, with a legitimation by national greatness. There is a streak of nationalism that sees China as having been robbed of large areas of East Asia that are now in Russia, Mongolia, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
I think that there is real reticence among the current CCP leadership about stoking nationalism and becoming openly militaristic. But the current leadership's term in office will be coming to an end in the next few years.
If large scale social unrest occurs, and to be clear we are just now coming to the end of the Chinese New Year holiday, where people traditionally go home to the country from their city jobs. Those city jobs have disappeared, and over the next few months these migrant workers money is going to start drying up. By the fall of this year, it's going to be clear how this first act plays out. If the social unrest continues on the present path, towards larger demonstrations, directed against the government, then something has to happen.
And if the government can't keep control, the PLA (Army) will, and that would most likely mean a quasi-military regime like in the late 1970s. For the past two decades, the PLA has been crafting an ideology of nationalism in contrast to the ideology of development at work in the present leadership.
So we'll see.
What is clear though, is that the Chinese military is using the spending to boost recruitment, and to modernize weapons. As I understand it, the Navy is currently trying to acquire an aircraft carrier, and blue water capability. This means that they could project power, for example put troops in Africa, supply them, and have air support for the mission.
This is a very, very short overview.
civil unrest
The Friday Night videos, the Ascent of Money, I finally figured out what was going on.
It's clear he updated the entire series most recently...
and is just about 30 days ago and the new updated series is going to be run again but they went ahead and put it online almost immediately.
to the point, he is all over China in the last segment and he is saying, they are not hurting a bit. No where near the U.S. Europe, U.K.
I've seen other reports that they are but nothing to the point of civil unrest.
Watch the segment (last in the series)and check out the air pollution plus the fact China ripped up prime farmland (of which they don't have enough) to build a "global financial center".