ScotsAlan

I agree. Somewhere in between. But come on. What if America done this in Germany? Or France, or the Island? How did they get their info on where to strike. Tin hat time.... ha ha I like forums. I was made a mod on one of the most popular "expat" websites in China. But I made my socialist tendencies clear. That is my political view. I was destroyed by right wingers. They published my name, exposed me. I had no power to ban them from the site. So I left. Pulling my tin hat on tighter.... The CIA has a massive budget. I am positive that they pay for American agents to come teach in China and to try to set up anti CPC sentiment. It's difficult to really put my finger on why I believe this, it's just a feeling off "if you are so anti China why did you come here?" Of course, many come to get a wife. Ex military, with no skills apart from speaking English. Strange people, who talk of machine gunning brown people. You would be amazed at how racist many expats are. Of course, by definition, you have to be mad to live here. And most foreigners living in China are mad, myself included. My Brit mates here would would be eligible for social workers back home. But they get on with the basics. Doing trade or whatever. But so many Americans are anti China, I do wonder who is paying their wages. I wonder why people move to a country they so openly hate. I don't love China, nor do I hate it. My home is where I hang my hat. My double skin tin foil hat :-)

That link worked without a vpn. As did Mother Jones. Makes me think about the taxi driver killed in a drone strike. https://www.rt.com/news/344844-pakistan-driver-family-sues/ Imagine if he had been a migrant taxi driver in New York targeted by a foreign power.

We also talked about Taiwan. This is the biggest danger. Trump thinks he can use Taiwan as a chip on the bargaining table. Nope. China will not budge on this. It is written into law. Article 8 is the biggie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Secession_Law I have not met any Chinese person that does not disagree with the one China policy. From pot smoking bikers to angst teenagers, from villagers to factory managers... the one China policily is deadly serious. Take it from me, in China... if Trump starts on that, China will take military action. This is my greatest fear. Trump thinking Taiwan wants independence, just the same as NORAID thought they were paying to get the Brits out of Ulster...

I live in China. I am qualified to be anti China :-)

Regarding Trump. In China, I have limited news. Censorship and all that. I have news apps on the IPad. HuffPost, Fox News, the Guardian, BBC, NBC, the Scotsman, the Daily Mail and CNN. I can get Breitbart on the web with no vpn. I can even get a Pakistan news website.. http://www.dawn.com/ And this... http://www.aljazeera.com/ But I can't get YouTube. It is driving me mad that I can't get Alex Jones on infowars or the Young Turks. Or Sam Seeder. Forget Alex Jones... don't want him. But I do want alternative American media that investigates and exposes. No stories on mainstream media to say what actions the countries affected are taking, for example. Yemen can't have banned Americans, American special forces are fighting there. One died today. An exercise planned under obama, executed by Trump. Why are American troops in Yemen? It's not fake news that troubles me. It's unreported news. While the Trump Muslim ban is headlines, what else is going on that is being ignored.

May has just been to Turkey to sign a $100 million deal for fighter jets. She claimed Turkish and U.K. friendship goes back hundreds of years. Makes me think of Gallipoli and the town of Drogheda in Ireland. Winston lost his job over Gallipoli. He entered his wilderness years over that. The bust of Winston was placed between May and Trump during their press conference.... then she flew over to sell fighter jets to the guy who is working hard on being a dictator and is doing all he can to destroy secularism in Turkey. She laid a wreath at Attaturks grave then went on to do a deal that stands against everything that Attaturk stood for. In my simplistic view, the easiest way to stop war is simply to stop making guns. But May is out there selling them to a despotic regime. Human rights? Ha ha. As a matter of interest... I had a chat with some young Chinese guys tonight... Fuck Trump they declared. I checked "China Daily"... yup... China is having a go at Trump for banning refugees. I asked them how many refugees China admitted. I binged it. Zero. They said too many people in China. I binged population density. China is 80th, two places below the IOM. Yup.. the IOM is more densely populated than China. When presented with facts.. the young Chinese... their response.... "We hate fucking Japanese". And by the way, I used wiki to get the facts. Wiki in English, with no VPN. When I tried to change the wiki to Chinese, I got 404. Their reaction... your are a foreigner... you get better treatment in China than the Chinese. That sounds familiar. Straight from the Britain first handbook.

A bit like the opium wars.

The photo of May holding his hand...disturbed me. She held his hand... rather than point her finger to his face and call him out as a bully. I thought the bullied kids were supposed to be taught to punch the bullies in the face to teach them a lesson. Cameron sold the U.K to china with that stupid selfie with the Chinese president. Now may servitudes to trump. Do any Torries have any fucking principles....

More than he had to pay out in compensation. Strange thing about American Justice. Buy your way out. Plea bargains..... reduced sentence to admit guilt to a lesser charge... or just plain buy off the plaintiffs. Elected judges who need funds to buy tv adverts... wow. Politically biased judges on the Supreme Court who are hired to interpret the constitution in a particular way. That is the biggie for me. Separation of judiciary and politics does not exist in the US. But they they claim to be the utopia of democracy.

Bubble journalism. I live in the same country as her. But we live in different worlds. She lives in the Empire. I live on the blue spec called earth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Gracie Typical BBC. A member of the Elite. This is why Trump won. But they don't get it. The elite can't see it. For the record , my eldest daughter went to Edinburgh University. She got a degree in PE. She wants to join the Scottish Prison service. I was lucky that I could afford to pay the rent on a flat while she studied. I see the contradiction... that makes me and my daughter elite. But when I was paying the 250 quid per month rent, I was eating baked beans most nights.

Trump is a purveyor of false news. As is Bannon, his ex Breitbart chief editor. But so is the BBC. Carrie Gracie in particular. She posts BBC stories that she claims are banned in China. I read them on the BBC website... in China.. without a VPN. To give the BBC credit, it might be banned in a particular part of China, but the blanket claim is false. When I click on my Firefox bookmark, on my Chinese phone, Chinese Network, headline "BBC blocked in China". No problem. I can see it. False news. Not because of policy I suspect. Lazy reporting. Carrie is monitored. If she can't open BBC.. Headline... "BBC banned in China". She is saying "Great headline", as her Chinese staff look at it on their Chinese phones. Edit spelling.

I have just done a non VPN search for Trump on Chinese youtubes. YouKou etc. Very little to be found. The SNL sketches Trump done in the past have been removed. Alex Baldwin seems to be banned here. BBC, The Guardian, Breitbart news, Fox News, all working ok. Even the huff post app is ok. CNN.. (Clinton news network).. can get the headlines, can't open the articles. Buzzfeed? Yup. Opens no problem. China does not like Trump... according to China. Interesting comments from Rex Tillerson re the South China Sea. Sources say there is oil there. He wants China out of the SCS. China threatens war. I suspect a receipt will bring down Trump. A receptionist will take a few million from a receipt for a new mattress for the Moscow Ritz Presidential suite :-) It's a difficult position. The press is supposed to be the guardian of freedom. It's supposed to hold elected leaders to account. I watched the entire Trump press conference. Not good. He bullied them. He put no policy forward. But the press has put him in power. The ratings battle for adverts and clicks. He gave free interviews, ratings soared. He even pointed it out. We are all being fooled. Russia and China wanted Trump. They know he can be bought. Then again... Clinton was bought, as was Obama. The press is bought. Why is nobody asking what republican paid an ex spy to investigate Trump? One new agency suggests it was Jeb Bush. If true, that is a scandal itself. Dirty Politics at it's worst. Power for the sake of power. The mass murderers of the 20th century were corrupted by power. Stalin, Mao and Hitler for example. They started out with a political ideal, and they were corrupted by their power. They pushed their agenda too far. They had an ideal, and they fought for it. The power corrupted them. They considered themselves Gods. They were bad people. Millions died. But now we have Trump, he sort of considers himself to be a God already. The constitution does not apply to him. He was born to lead. He is corrupt before he even stood for election. Fuck me. I wish I was still living in the house I was born in, internet bare, and ignorant :-)

It's not all doom and gloom in China you know. I have Chinese mates who have not stopped laughing since Trump won the Republican nomination for POTUS. Ha ha. Neither have I. Come on, is that the best democracy can do. Trump V Clinton? I bet if Trump was asked his opinion on the Paracels, his reponse would be along the lines of " I am a personal friend of the Fed-Ex boss".

I wonder if the coal, gas and oil power electricity generators will be next. Will we see the big boys of consumer power admit to cheating?

Hi China. The second link you posted. "Learn Chinese now". Can you post a full web address to that? It sounds ideal fror me. But your link does not work from behind the great firewall.

Have a look for "Chinese expat forums" Albert. Here for example, is a question from someone looking for phone apps. http://answers.echinacities.com/question/anyone-know-any-good-apps-or-programs-learning-mandarin?type=alatest#lastcomment A good one for learning info is here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/index My Chinese sucks. I know enough to get to the bar, buy beer, and get to a home.... then get to my home :-) My brain is just not wired for language. Why are you learning it by the way? Out of interest. For business or for a planned trip behind the great firewall? If the latter, you are welcome to kip at mine if you want to explore Guangzhou. And that's an offer open to all MF posters.

She has her hukou Chinahand, no problem with that. And she has her bit of paper that gives her full UK citizen rights. The only right she does not have is being able to pass her UK citizenship onto her kids, if she should have any. Anyway, sorry about my rants. I let this whole "anti China" thing get to me. Yes, of course, the Chinese Government is bad, evil, corrupt etc. But it annoys me that nobody seems willing to accept that they have done a single good thing. When they do a good thing, it's spun around to be a bad thing. This was drilled home to me when Xi was on his state visit to the UK. Reading the comments on the various UK news website, it struck me how ignorant people are about China. That's not a fault of course, because why should people take the time to find out about a place on the other side of the world when it has no direct impact on their lives? There is no need, just as I feel no need to understand the Peruvian Government system. It's irrelevant to my life. But the western press (especially the BBC) does have an anti China bias. And people formulate their opinions based on the news they read, no matter how irrelevant it actually is to them. I see it as almost subliminal programming. This is why I rant sometimes. All I see about China is bad, bad, bad, evil, evil evil. But it's not all bad and evil. The Daily mail would have us believe there are hundreds of millions of Chinese desperate to escape China to live in the UK on benefits. That's not true. It's a complete and utter lie. The BBC wants us to believe that the average Chinese person hates their Government because of the one child rule. That's not true. Ask a Chinese person what they think of the rule (soon to be 2 children of course), and they will say they understand it. "Too many people" is something you hear all the time in China. But if you say this to a westerner, their responce will be " brainwashed!!!" So with my little incoherant rants, I want to defend the Chinese Government. Of course they are not perfect, no Government is. But in general, the vast majority of the Chinese people I know feel their Government is going in the right direction. Sorry about my rants Chinahand. The anti China rhetoric wears me down at times.

Lets be friends.. Nobody in this photo is desperate to move to the Uk. They want to be in china. Its a myth that all Chinese want a Brit passport.

Chinese opression... Halloween party..

Here she is. Three years on. I remember sending you MF pms from the delivery room. The only real way forward is to share. Not to be better than others because you happen to have a certain passport. My daughter has a Chinese passport. I am proud of that. She has her certificate of right to abode also. But its my daughters choice if she wants to be in china or the UK. She will only have that choice if we are here. If I take her to the UK she will be British and she will lose the choice I choose to stay. You went back. We both had difficult choices... And made different decisions.

I thought the actual state visit was great. The Royals pulling out all the stops. Fantastic. Cameron and Osborne in lapdog mode was sickening. Then this...

Does nobody care that the UK Government has turned its back on human rights and democracy? I was disgusted by what I saw this week. Cameron with his begging bowl. I think the state visit was great. Trade deals are fantastic. But all I saw this week was a British PM holding out a begging bowl. My Chinese friends are lapping it up. But yet, whenever I post in support of China, I am dismissed as a nutter left winger. An apologist. A commie. Everyone says I am wrong. But not a single comment on MF about the Tories selling out to China. They have nothing left to sell, so they sell the future. They are selling consumers and tax payers to China. They are selling the core needs (energy) to the highest bidder, irrespective of where that money comes from. See my point...? But keep going with your china bashing. China deserves to be bashed. It really does. But Cameron and Osborne sold that right this week. China outbid Saudi Arabia. China can offer nuclear, Saudi Arabia can only offer oil. Human rights of course are swept under the carpet. Edit to add.. Just realized what Cameron sold this week.. The ultimate thing to buy in capitalism. He sold the taxpayer. He sold it to China.

Right Chinahand. Question for you, or indeed, for anyone that can explain economics to me :-) When I lived in the UK, and was paying UK taxes, the Tory mantra was that none of my tax should be spent on nationalised industries. All money had to come from the private sector they would say. Every project had to pay for itself and make money for someone. The trickle down effect of the capatalist economy would benefit everyone. Ha ha. Well, as most people on here know, I tend to lean towards the left in politics, so for me nationalisation of key industries are a good thing. Railways and power generation for example. I have always felt that infrastructure in general should be run for the people, on a non profit basis for the benefit of all. Not for the benefits of investors who want a return on their money. You know what's coming... So, I live in China these days, and pay Chinese tax. And as a Chinese tax payer, I now find myself an investor in future UK infrastructure projects. How does that work then? When I was paying UK tax, the UK was selling off all it's infrastructure to make money. Now I pay Chinese tax to the Chinese Government, my money goes to Chinese state owned companies that will be building power stations and railways in the UK !!!! I can't for the life of me figure out what the Tories ( and Blair's mob) are thinking. If Investment has to come from the private sector, how do they come to define other countries Nationalised industries as private investment? I cant figure it out :-) And what did they do with the tax I paid them? I know where my tax goes in China. I can see it being spent on infrastructure. And this week I saw it being spent in the UK..... on infrastructure. ( Note, I refer to paying UK tax as in when I was living in the UK, not from my 10 years living on the IOM) It's a topsy turvy world.

Here is the latest from China. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-10/22/content_22250580.htm From what I can work out, it means the Party has extended it's jurisdiction from the leading cadres to the entire membership of 88 million people. So, if you are a member of the party, you are responsible to the party, above the law. Previously, if a leader done anything naughty, the Police and the courts were not allowed to do anything unless the Party allowed them. This has now been extended to all members. There is a little bit from the BBC on it, but they have sort of missed the main point of the change and went for the more titilating bits. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34600544 The reasoning behind this law change is that the moral and criminal standards the Party expects of it's members is higher than that expected by the Police and Courts for the general populace. I have been talking to some ordinary Party members about this today. It was news to them. But that is normal here. Laws change but the details are rarely made public.

VW are fucked. But.. They are not the first to be caught out. Google it. Cummins engines done the same 10 years ago. This is big... Because governments agreed the test regime to suit the Kyoto agreement. Government and corporate cheated.