Tag: china

30 stories in 15 days

Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Sustainable Building, is not a particularly humble man. A humble man would not have erected, on his firm’s corporate campus in the Chinese province of Hunan, a classical palace and a 40m replica of an Egyptian pyramid. A humble man, for that matter, would not have redirected Broad from its core business—manufacturing industrial air-conditioning units—to invent a new method of building skyscrapers. And a humble man certainly wouldn’t be putting up those skyscrapers at a pace never achieved in history.

Tax Enforcement

how you can get a modicum of tax revenue in a cash-only society. take note, italy / greece.

China has crowdsourced tax enforcement, by potentially rewarding citizens with a cash reward for asking for all of their tax pre-payment receipts, and using them up by scratching off the prize areas. The cost of this massive force multiplier is vanishingly small, as all they are offering is the chance to win; I have only ever seen one winning ticket in the past couple of years, and it was for about 2 kuai. Still, it is a nice cultural touch to the end of a big meal, everyone sitting in a circle, scratching their fapiao to see if they won a prize for playing the part of a Chinese tax enforcement agent.

Evacuated Tube Transport

This sounds like a save the world kind of technology. For a 1T investment, 2h for New York – Beijing. This, combined with a global grid, would get us most of the way to a kardashev level 1 civilization.

2017-09-06:

CASIC will build a maglev transportation system with a top speed of 3700 km/h. The network would consist of 2 tubes per line—each tube is strictly 1-way only—with built in maglev systems, and would be powered in large part by the solar panels on top of the tubes. Given the high speeds and high-traffic density of T Flight capsules at any time, operations would be highly automated, and possibly AI-aided.

2018-03-04:

A maglev line would use partly or fully evacuated tubes or tunnels. Reduced air resistance could permit vactrains to travel at very high speeds with relatively little power—up to 8000 km/h. China has slashed air pressure in a test track tube to 2.9 kilopascal, 33x lower than normal air pressure.

China Leadership Transition

Over the past few months, several people have written asking me to offer a short “primer” on China’s upcoming leadership transition, which begins next year. The handover to a new president and premier has generated plenty of speculation in the press, about who the leaders are and what is will all mean, but sometimes it’s useful to go back and fill in the very basics, since China has a unique and in some ways quite confusing political system.

The first and most important thing to understand about that political system is that it is composed of 3 parts. In the US, we have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In China there is the Party, the Army, and the State. Unlike in the US, where the 3 branches are co-equal and are specifically designed to check and balance each other’s powers, in China the Party is supreme and rules over the other 2 elements. China’s “leadership transition” involves coordinated handovers of power involving all 3 parts of the political system.

kremlinology applied to china’s leadership

The Jasmine Revolution

several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with 2 important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

trolling the chinese security apparatus