Asymmetrical Information

Huh. That was weird. I suppose I ought to be glad that (if Tong, Lu was indeed in mainland China as he appeared to be) the blogosphere has added an annex, and free speech is having its day even in the PRC. I suppose.

But as Princess Fiona said in Shrek, "Man, that was annoying."

I saw this 'Tong Lu' somewhere else too, in the past day or two. Give me a bit and maybe I can find it. Brad Delong's place, maybe?

Wow -- my head hurts after reading all of that. I guess that's the beauty of comment threads. P.S. What the heck is a "bub"? It's some kind of insult (he throws it around so much), but I'm not quite sure what it means.

I believe the last time we saw "Tong Lu" he was calling Hank Hill a stupid redneck. "Bub" probably comes to pretty much the same thing.

I've also seen one NYT article where they said the economy was booming - so they could criticize Bush for running a deficit even in a booming economy.

I think "bub" translates as "boob."

A lot of young Turks in fast-growth ecnomies talk like they own the world, until scorching growth rolls over into recession, then their shattered dreams are someone else's fault.

Other than his trash talk tone, some of what Glue Tongue says is true -- Detroit is floundering, a lot of job creation in recent years consists of low-wage service jobs, and China finances the largest part of the US deficit.

On the other hand, Detroit's loss is made up for by German and Japanese "transplants" in Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama and California, where Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mercedes et al. build nice cars in new US factories. Detroit has had decades to get it together and they still fall short, IMHO, so maybe they deserve to die.

It strains credulity to believe that China will be serious agricultural competitor to the US. Arable land is scarce next to their outsized population, signficant segments of which are still malnourished. So how do you like them apples?

I think China is indeed a scary competitor, much more scary than India, for example. Wages are extremely low. They have a work ethic that rivals anyone's. They have millions of very, very bright scientists and engineers and a culture that honors education. They are flush with cash due their huge trade surpluses. Street crime is relatively uncommon in most parts of the country. Saving money is a way of life. What has held them back is Communism and Communism is pretty much a dead letter.

On the other hand much of their competitive edge in the market place is predicated on two things: Slave-level labor costs and a cheap currency. While the cheap labor is an artifact of underdevelopment, the cheap currency is purely artificial. That's where the biggest corrective needs to come.

China's hoard of US Treasury debt is truly unnerving but it's not China's fault that Washington runs huge deficits. If we don't like the lemmons we shouldn't grow the tree.

Let's bear in mind that China has some real challenges, too. There are still at least 75 million people working for money-losing state-owned-enterprises. Most of those people should be layed off, but the government doesn't dare.

Rural poverty is such that theree's huge in-migration to urban centers, which could create governance problems in the near future. Electricity shortages are acute but the rails system is already stressed to supply coal to pwer plants as it is. In short, there is an on-going energy crisis that will not go away anytime soon.
Business owners tend to view investors' money as their own (sort of like Tyco, but on a bigger scale) and transparency is an alien concept. This could inhibit foreign investment once our rose colored glasses clear up.

True, the PRC has many very, very bright scientists and engineers. However, the "millions" of their engineers(don't know about their scientists) are more akin to American/Japanese/German, et al technicians rather than four+ year degree engineers. Anyway, there are very few, if any, jobs for engineers going unfilled in the USA so why be concerned about the numbers comparison? If I'm wrong on the jobs condition in the USA, please let me know on here so I can find one.

Mike in Appalacia: I probably should have said "zillions." I did find an interesting stat: According to China Daily, about a third of Chinese engineers are women (9.88 million in the year 2000), which implies a total engineer population of 27 million. What was not disclosed is the level of their education. Another interesting stat.: All nine members of the elite Politburo Standing Committee are engineers.

I'm not sure what point you're making about there not being unfilled engineering jobs in the US. My point was that China's economy is not predicated on commodity exports or production of primitive gimcracks that require little brain power. To the degree that the US bases its economic optimism on a rich supply of brainy tech types, we should be aware that China has lots of like-minded people. As many a US software engineer has found out in the last three years, Indian engineers can take their jobs without leaving home -- and earn a relative pittance.

You may well be right that "engineer" in China could mean what "technician" does here -- which would not make China's 27 million engineers nearly so impressive. Still, even 27 million techies is a huge number. How many do you think we have?

Jamie: > the blogosphere has added an annex, and free speech is having its day even in the PRC. I suppose.

Now THAT's darned annoying!
Most of my comment has vanished, somewhere between "preview" and "post." Lemmee try again:

As best I can make it out, the consensus over and QandO seems to be that this "Tongue Glue" chap is some sort of PRC-gummint flack. If they're right, then he's doing pretty much the opposite of free speech. I can't be sure either way, because I'm on an irony-free diet and can't tell who's parodying whom, lately.

Yeah, we're pretty sure that "Tong, Lu" is a Chinese "internet policy" apparatchik, who spreads PRC propaganda for a living. He's been "with us" for a bit now.

I googled him and saw some of his comments elsewhere and (in one) he seems to be claiming to be from San Francisco. In questioning (without telling him about the googling) he indicated that he actually does live in China. Plus, he awfully familiar with the talking points.

In any event, what sealed it for me was two-pronged.

1) I asked him if his life was more valuable to him than the child of the Chinese leader? Or the life of the Chinese leaders pet? He did everything but answer.

2) I asked, begged, him to criticize the Chinese leadership. Just one criticism. He hemmed and hawed and eventually came up with (something like) "they don't do enough to put out the word about how wonderfully their policies are working".

It seems to me that he's quite, ah, constrained in what he can say.

In any event, "bub" is something he began calling us almost immediately. He seemed to think that's something we called each other. Perhaps the manual said he should use American colloquialisms and that's a word they think we use.

So it appeared (clearly the guy was at least a True Believer, though I didn't tumble to his being a real live gov't propagandist) - I was just flashing back to something I heard long ago about the Great Firewall of China or something like that and wondering whether Chinese folk actually had ANY significant WWW access.

Apparently a few of them do, as long as they sling the right lingo.

Thanks for the info!

that's a great thread, very amusing. it reinforces my belief in U.S. democracy/capitalism!

the dispersed interests and actions of free people always has and always will always beat out centralized, authoritarian control. the minds of ~250MM free Americans is far greater than that of the thousands of group-thinking communist party leaders.

Something is fishy with this Tong Lu. His pidgin sounds fake, especially since so much else of his English is idiomatic. He may in fact be Chinese, but that is unlikely. He sounds like an American trying to sound Chinese.

Oh my, I've dealt with one of these before, but on the level of an unpleasant person-to-person interchange (and Korean IIRC, not Chinese), rather than with an actual Party Propgandist.

The basic premise is the same one the European Left has been wallowing in for many years, except the Europeans (mostly) have grown tired of arguing and just share the banter within their own undisturbed echo chambers. In SE Asia, on the other hand, there are many young economies and many young professionals who haven't yet had a chance to spleen-vent, and will take advantage of an opportunity to do so.

And I likewise suspect that "Long, Tu" is some sort of full-time Internet propaganda dispenser for the Chinese Communists. At first I thought he might just be a young Chinese idealogue (or doing an excellent job of impersonating one). But when he started spouting that car salesman schtick about the superiority of having elites choose leaders and claiming to speak on behalf of "the farmers" or "the people," it became obvious. I've known people who, unlike "Long, Tu" evidently, have visited the rural regions of China and brought back firsthand accounts of the quality of life, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. Summarily: by varying degrees underemployed, understaffed, and underdeveloped.

China has a lot of potential, but they have a lot of progress to make before they can claim to have the US locked under their future thumb.

I've encountered his ilk on the Yahoo MBs. What gets amusing is when they provide themselves with Anglo names and claim to be from here complete with very non-idiomatic English. OTOH, since this is new to them give it time. A decade or 2 down the road and some of them will actually be pretty good at what they do. That'll be when the info wars become for real.

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