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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.
...
84
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 ...
81
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 ...
76
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 ...
70
How far applicable the law of a country is is decided by the law of that country. If other countries disagree, they can obviously decline to assist in the enforcement of those laws, and disallow the agents of the first country to act on their territory.
There even is precedent that a country outlaws behaviour not related to it at all. For example, German law ...
69
"Only 250"?
That's plenty for their purposes. Nukes are meant to be seen, not heard. Even if the US could intercept 99/100 missiles, having 250 means china can deliver a devastating enough attack that the US is encouraged to avoid the scenario at almost all costs. That's reasonable deterrence for their particular threat model, and for a fledgling ...
67
Why is the United States voluntarily funding the World Health Organization 60 times more than China?
Partial frame challenge if you like. Fox News has chosen an interesting year to highlight. As you can see, US voluntary contributions have varied a lot; only $112 million in 2011 (and similar in 2014) for example.
A portion of these are also "earmarked funds", i.e. WHO can't spend them as they please, but only as the donor specifies, so e.g. the US DoD ...
60
Genocide Defined
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the international law defining the crime of genocide) says that genocide is:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) ...
56
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 ...
56
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 ...
55
The Chinese government has spent the last decade and more very actively pursuing the extension of their territorial waters into what is commonly accepted to be international waters, or even the territorial waters of other sovereign nations. Mostly within the South China Sea.
They do this by arbitrarily claiming islands, or by creating artificial islands ...
55
TikTok doesn't take just your location data, it also takes your clipboard. Everything you copy/paste while TikTok is open, even if it's only open in the background, is sent to their servers. So passwords, banking info, bitcoin addresses, anything at all that you might copy. This is not normal. This is why it is a national security risk.
Caleb Chen, ...
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Arguably, the United States of America has. Sort of. It's confusing.
The federal government, or rather the president and some of his cabinet, has largely left the response up to individual states. It's less of a conclusion, and more a result of chaos and denial at the Federal level.
It is difficult to write this up in a neutral tone, to find sources with ...
53
It's because they previously saw Australia as a weak link in the Western democratic alliance, and are not happy that they are now firmly siding with the U.S. and other Five Eyes.
Australia has long been open to Chinese investment and immigration, and until recently had remained, if not neutral, at least moderate in their stance on issues such as sovereignty ...
53
The USA has signed (in 1948) and ratified (in 1988) the UN Convention on Genocide - one of the founding declarations of the UN in 1948.
The convention commits its signatories to the following obligations (among others):
Obligation not to commit genocide (Article I as interpreted by the ICJ)
Obligation to prevent genocide (Article I) which, according to the ...
52
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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The question you added in comments I think is more specifically interesting; We mostly know why the CCP does what it does in Xinjiang (GC Campbell comment), but following that logic, it would do the same in Tibet.
The answer is they did! And the same Party member that was in charge of developing the surveilllance state and re-education camps in Tibet (Chen ...
50
If you're referring to this (light blue flag on the left):
Then yes, that is the East Turkistan flag, and is likely being flown by people trying to draw attention to the oppression of Uighurs by the Chinese government. It isn't uncommon to see people sneak side-demonstrations in at places they know public figures and the media will be, and the East ...
50
The CCP is in a strange position. They are nominally Communist, but they've largely jettisoned its economic prescriptions (because they don't work). They're a one-party state (more or less dictatorial depending on your viewpoint).
So they're in power but don't have Marxism to really fall back to as an ideology. They're also unable to rally people around a ...
answered Dec 30 '20 at 0:15
Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
20.2k7 gold badges54 silver badges88 bronze badges
49
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-...
49
The US had five(now four) consulates in China: Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenyang, Wuhan. The United States also has an embassy in Beijing. They all have their own consular/embassy district, just like this picture quoted from Wikipedia:
You can see: Xinjiang is included in the Beijing consular district. Tibet is in Chengdu consular district. If Chengdu ...
45
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.
There ...
45
An article in Wired took a look at this a few weeks ago. By and large, the experts agree with your assessment that TikTok in particular poses no special security risk and that a ban is not justified. Here's a key paragraph from the Wired piece.
TikTok’s fiercest opponents argue that it should be viewed as a dangerous Trojan horse for Chinese Communist Party ...
40
It is quite common for countries to prosecute both actions by and against their nationals as soon as the perpetrator enters their jurisdiction. Some will also prosecute certain crimes by anyone who is presently in their jurisdiction, no matter where they happened.
Some key points to take away:
For some crimes (a citizen of country A murders a citizen of ...
38
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 ...
38
The term 'democratic' literally means 'rule by the people'. In the West we normally associate that with a particular set of institutions — capitalist property rights, free and fair elections, open press, etc — but those are not the only form of rule that can be attributed to the people. Nations that derive from socialist principles are often predicated on ...
37
No, China is unlikely to invade any countries which refuses to pay their debt. No, they will do something far worse: They will tell the rating agencies!
Every government has a credit rating assigned to it by the three big rating agencies: Standard & Poor's, Fitch and Moody's. These credit ratings are determined by analysts at these companies and serve as ...
37
Much of international law is either customary law or created by treaties with different membership. When two states agree on something concerning the two of them, that tends to stand. So trying to draw analogies too firmly is probably futile and misleading.
Both the PRC and the ROC agree that there is, in principle, one China.
They disagree if the ...
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