[Peace-discuss] A sanguine view of what China expects to achieve

[E. Wayne Johnson]

I read US "headlines" that Beijing is doing this and
Beijing is doing that and Beijing is plotting this or that.
Psalm 2 in capital letters.

Expressing Chinese GDP in US dollars can be rather misleading.

In the late 1990s the black market exchange rate
(and hence the true exchange rate was 10 RMB for one us dollar)

However, for the purposes of daily living, One RMB could buy as
much of the stuff you need to live in China as One us dollar could
buy if you lived in the USA.  That means that the correction factor was 100.

In 1998 I got a haircut in Qi county for $0.08 (8 cents) including
getting my hair washed before and after.  Now you
may say it is a function of my sparse natural tonsure
but I assure you friends I was charged a complete price.  No finders fee
for the haircut.

It is impossible to compare the similar but much poorer service in Urbana
and who is scalping who.

There are also gradients of money value across China.
Beijing is a very expensive place to live as compared with
some more remote yet modern regions.  For the daily life,
(food, clothing, etc.)
it probably is fair to say that the prices in Beijing are
twice to three times the prices in Qi County.

In the early '90s Forrest Gump said "People in China ain't got nuthin'".
At that time it is relatively true and one could say that relative to the
stagnation of the USA an economic miracle has occurred in China.

If you really want to know something about China, Bill Holm's "Coming 
Home Crazy"
is still a decent read and insightful.

Modernisation has a fractal boundary at the interface between old and new.
It is not a crisp Euclidean wavefront.  At all.


David Green via Peace-discuss wrote:
> It's important to note that according to one credible data set, China in
> 1969 had a per capita GDP (in 2010 dollars) of $193, almost the lowest in
> the world, except for Cambodia, Mozambique, and Djibouti (the latter $17
> !!). By 2014, their per capita GDP (again 2010 dollars) was $6,000, a
> multiple of about 30 (that is, doubling almost 5 times) over 45 years.
> Nothing else like it, obviously in terms of rapid development, although S.
> Korea & Taiwan grew by multiples of 10 to over $20,000. I assume that the
> cultural revolution had something to do with the low baseline in 1969,
> nevertheless...
>
> DG
>
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 7:08 PM Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss <
> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>> http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/china-opens-to-world-as-trump-erects-protectionist-walls/
>>
>> Over-optimistic? Yet impressive in its comprehensiveness.
>>
>> —mkb
>> _______________________________________________
>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20180716/f9424c50/attachment.html>