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Putin is de facto leader for more than 3 mandates (not much big difference from "for life") and I do not remember to be illustrated so harshly
Consider revisiting your news sources somewhat. There was an international outcry at the time (in the West anyway), because he had the constitution changed to stay in power.
Plus, whataboutism is a logical fallacy.
...
85
Trade surplus/deficit
Devaluing one's currency means mostly one thing: It becomes more expensive to import products from abroad, while one's own products become comparably cheaper to buy on the world market. That means a country which exports lots of goods wants to devalue their currency while a country which imports lots of goods does not.
In 2016, Turkey ...
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There are some assumptions being made by this question that don't reflect how the international economic order works.
Countries do not ever have to pay off all of their debt
A nation's finances are not like a person's. A person has a finite lifespan, and creditors take this into account when giving a loan. A country does not have a finite lifespan, and ...
70
Other than the reasons of practicality mentioned, there is also the issue of international laws and treaties, specifically on the issue of "successor states." There definitely was some debate, as the situation in China is not considered a traditional succession of states scenario. But most legal scholars at the time agreed that the current "government in ...
55
But where exactly is the line North Korea must cross?
Line setting is generally acknowledged as a bad idea. For example, Barack Obama set a red line in Syria about chemical weapons. Then they used chemical weapons. And Obama looked like an idiot when he did not respond with military force.
Lines are bad for two reasons. One, they force action if the ...
55
Just to clarify, this isn't at all like the GPS Selective Availability case where bits were unavailable unless you knew the key. The Chinese don't have their own GPS satellites (duh) setting these coordinates. What this GCJ-02 business is is a non-disclosed, but not-so-hard-to-reverse engineer conversion algorithm from other coordinates. The big picture ...
53
No, dropping the ROC name makes the situation worse as the PRC claims that China is indivisible and that the island of Taiwan is part of China. Hence, the usual threat is that they will launch an invasion immediately if Taiwan claims independence. By sticking to the ROC name, both sides can pretend they are working towards reconciliation and reunification.
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There will be others wanting power in China. If the President has a 10 year maximum term then those others can hope to gain power keeping out of trouble, biding their time, building networks of support. I.e. playing the usual political games.
If the President cannot be removed by constitutional means, then the only way for him to be removed is extra-...
43
Beyond the whole probably start a war (between PRC/China and ROC/Taiwan) and completely ignoring the realpolitik to avoid annoying a major economic power (even then), a major reason is quite simply geography.
One of the reasons Hong Kong proper wasn't kept is a large part of the territory was leased mainland China. This not only means mainland China is the '...
40
It's true there is a clause stating extradition from Hong Kong to China cannot be based on political motives. However, there are worries the Chinese government would fabricate charges just to get dissidents over to China, as they have done or tried to do before. In general, it's very problematic to determine whether the charges are truly not political.
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35
To add to Gramatiks' excellent answer, the question makes another incorrect assumption, that China is somehow doing US a favor by lending money.
On one hand, US clearly benefits by having more demand for its debt (and thus, duh, having the debt being cheaper - finance/economics 101). On the other hand, China is not doing this out of being nice, but of ...
33
Peter Navarro, the White House National Trade Council and Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director, put out a report called "How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World". In it there are many specific accusations against Chinese "economic aggression", with evidence cited for ...
24
Not taking over North Korea is not exactly because of the difficulties involved, since the Chinese have a relatively powerful military currently.
Rather, it doesn't benefit China much. Firstly, China would have to inherit the whole North Korean population and provide them with food, necessities, etc. It may even result in a refugee crisis for China should ...
24
The United States would do what any other nation would do: Borrow the money from someone else. Either from other governments, from private banks or from private people. Governments do this by issuing government bonds. These are openly traded financial instruments. The government motivates people to buy these from them by guaranteeing an interest rate. When ...
23
Before we discuss qualitative "fairness", there's a practical reason to single China out even if it's not qualitatively different: scale.
US trade deficit is $795B total. Of that, $375B or 47%, is with China (source: Wikipedia) - dwarfing deficit with any other country (more than twice the size of next biggest entity, EU, and more than 5 times the deficit ...
22
I wonder if there is a branch of feminism which has taken up the cause against sex-selective abortion?
All branches of feminism are against infanticide, and many are against sex-selective abortions. However, most western feminist groups are unlikely to make it the center of their activism, as it is not a large problem in the west.
One example of a ...
22
Why "president for life" in China is such a big deal?
— Because the increasing shift towards a dictatorship state¹ may trigger a chain of uncontrolled events that, in turn, would undermine the Western investments and the international trade.
TL;DR
The logic is fairly simple:
In any country, the government is a mixture of various groups of influence;
...
21
Two of the longest rivers in China originate in Tibetan Plateau. China could face very dangerous threats without Tibet under its control:
Several major rivers have their source in the Tibetan Plateau (mostly
in present-day Qinghai Province). These include the Yangtze (longest river in Asia, Yellow
River (third longest river in Asia, Indus River, ...
21
Assuming your question is to be interpreted as "show me examples", what happened more recently that's reasonably relevant to a scenario like you propose was Wukan, in which local anti-corruption and to a certain extent pro-[local]-democracy activists were eventually suppressed:
During the 2011 protests, Zhuang helped barricade the coastal hamlet of 15,000 ...
20
Not a complete answer, but elements of thoughts:
Even if China could somehow kill Kim Jong Un and get away with it, would that mean the collapse of NK regime? After all, it has survived the successive deaths of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il without major changes in its shape.
NK can be a pain in the neck for China, but it sure is a bigger problem for the US ...
20
First of all, for clarity, China never claimed to be communist.
I have reviewed the full text of Chinese Constitution (both the China's Constitution of 1982 with Amendments through 2004, as well as 2017 changes published by Xinhua).
It does not mention China being a Communist country anywhere. As a matter of fact, the only time the word "communis(m|t)" ...
20
The key is that extradition hearings are not trials that establish innocence or guilt. From your quote, the requirement for extradition is that there is:
sufficient prima facie evidence that there is a possible case
To people who think that China is willing to occasionally forge evidence and hold mock trials, that is equivalent to "prolonged imprisonment ...
19
The "We Are Still In" campaign is more of a statement than an agreement for concrete action or cooperation. From the press release that they issued, it's basically to "declare that we (they) will continue to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement":
The statement calls “The Trump administration’s announcement [one that] undermines a key pillar ...
18
Why didn't the USA (west) take measures to stop China from became the new superpower while they can?
Because, as your own subsequent question points out, China is (or, at least, in 1950s, was) a more acceptable superpower, unlike Russia; or for that matter a lot further from becoming a superpower, acceptable or not.
Why is the US so aggressive against ...
18
The National Interest covers the invasion scenario nicely here. It is unlikely, due to the atomic weapons N Korea has, and probably a substantial supply of chemical weapons as well. The heavily populated city of Seoul is very close to the border, and would likely become a target of revenge with very high civilian casualties.
China recently positioned a ...
17
Interestingly, the name that China and Taiwan compromised on, for the Olympics at least, is "Chinese Taipei". In that context, China rejected the Republic of China (henceforth ROC) name, which Taiwan wanted to keep on using.
I don't know if that mini-settlement on the Olympic name for Taiwan has any implications for the naming of Taiwan in other contexts.
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Sure. Everyone gets a perspective, so if, to you, that constitutes political censorship, then I can see how that argument gets made.
But the flip side of that argument is true also. If the majority of those 200,000 accounts were bots meant to stifle speech from their political opponents, then the argument can be made that Twitter is trying to do something ...
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The western model of democracy gives the people the opportunity to elect their authorities, participate in the political life and the rigth to express themselves as they wish to do. China, in their own way, accepts these principles and give their citizen the opportunity to participate in political life, sometimes closer than democracy. The magazine Foreign ...
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Why do you think they can or ever could? China has four times more population, vast natural resources, venerable ancient culture, and the Chinese are in no way less intelligent, resourceful or determined than Americans. The only way to stop China from realizing its human potential is to constantly create havoc and misery for them, preventing them from ...
15
No, in fact Taiwan itself has abandoned any serious plan to recapture the mainland. There was a project, called Project National Glory, that has this as its explicit objective and it ended in 1972 after a series of failures, both military and diplomatic ones. In particular in 1971 the UN switch recognition of the legitimate government of China from the ...
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