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Apparently China is likely in recession, according to Roubini.

All kinds of awesome.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Sat Jan 24th, 2009 at 12:05:30 PM EST
china has problems. If they use this downturn to re-point their manufacturing away from being massively polluting and put in a lot of capital effort (with lots of jobs) into cleaning up their rivers it could do them some good. But I don't think the chinese see it this way.

keep to the Fen Causeway
by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Sat Jan 24th, 2009 at 01:10:45 PM EST
[ Parent ]
It's much deeper than a recession, the social dislocation going on here is extremely dangerous.

There are people who left their villages during the past few years, and have taken jobs in the cities.  When they did so, many turned over their land to friends or family.

Now a lot of these families are returning home, and land disputes are already breaking out.  The alternative for the returning families is to try to find work in the village that is not in the fields.

In order to escape from this, the Chinese have to discover how to build a functional economy, because the one they've built depended upon selling products elsewhere.  Because, the pay was so low that Chinese workers couldn't buy the products that they were manufacturing.  And because of this, they had to export in order to grow.

This model of economic development is parasitic, and contrasts pretty strongly with the way that Spain and Ireland were integrated into the European market.

Labor repressive development is unsustainable in the long term, because if the parasite is large enough it ultimately kills off the host.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

by ManfromMiddletown (manfrommiddletown at lycos dot com) on Sat Jan 24th, 2009 at 02:46:31 PM EST
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