Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.
It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.
China is collapsing before our very eyes, and it’s already too late to turn things around. There’s literally nothing that the CCP can do to get themselves out of this hole. The demographics are cooked, the economics are cooked, the public infrastructure is cooked, the foreign policy is cooked, the domestic politics are cooked, their environments are cooked, and the list goes on and on. China is one big clusterfuck right now and we should watch everything as it unfolds and take notes on it. China’s downfall is going to be the biggest and most devastating self inflected collapse in history.
We should also do the same with Russia because they’re also collapsing as we speak and it might be the end of Russia as a multiethnic empire for good. We’re living in interesting times people
I’m the first one to hate on the CCP, but people have been saying that China is going to collapse anytime now for 20 years.
The demographics are a real problem, but nothing that will cause an immediate collapse. Housing, youth unemployment and inequality are real imminent issues, but the CCP has survived much worse and I think they will survive this as well.
Economical they have made some good bets, investing in solar and batteries, for that alone we should hope they don’t collapse, it would be a setback of several years or maybe decades.
I believe China will more go the way of Japan, stagnate but not collapse.
apart from solar and batteries, they also seem to be doing quite well on wind and train infrastructure
Absolutely. As far as solar goes, one statistic I like to point out is that China added more solar panels last year than the U.S. has in its entire history.
Demographic collapses don’t happen overnight, they take decades to unfold. Demographers were able to predict China’s demographic collapse since they started seeing the demographic shifts that happened due to the implantation of the one child policy back in 1979. That’s why you’ve been hearing about it for so long and why you’ll continue to hear about it for years to come. As time marches on, those demographic collapse went from being predictions to becoming reality, and as time continues to pass, the current trends will continue to get worse and worse. The damage these demographic trends will inflect on the system will incrementally increase year by year until the system can’t support itself any longer.
The thing is that they can’t reverse the demographic situation. Even if China started forcing people to have kids or opened their borders to allow for millions of immigrants, it won’t mean anything. It’s already too late, the demographic collapse is going to happen no matter what the CCP does. Keep in mind, Japan is in the same position and they will face the same fate regardless. The only difference is that Japan is a wealthy country with a highly developed economy, so it can at least slow down the inevitable and buy itself some time. China unfortunately doesn’t have this luxury.
For the record, I don’t want China to collapse like this because the effects are going to be devastating. However, the numbers don’t lie and every metric is showing us that they are heading towards a collapse at full speed. The CCP can’t handle this, no government can in their position. There’s really nothing like what China is going through in history. The scale and speed at which this collapse is happening is unprecedented. It’ll most likely go down as the most defining event of the 21st century.
This sounds very close to the description of the US in this very moment. From an outsiders perspective China seems to be doing about as good and bad as the US all things considered.
Except Chin’s dictator is grown up.
U.S. has been complete shit for the last 8 years, but somehow we haven’t collapsed and life goes on as usual. So I’m usually pretty skeptical of specific predictions (though the trends are worth paying attention to).
The single most accurate predictor of a country’s future is their demographic structure, and China’s is one of the worst, not just in the world, but in history. It’s pretty normal for nations to go into cycle of prosperity and despair where they expand and shrink, however, what China is going through is unique. China’s population is predicted to shrink down from 1.4 billion people to just 587 million by 2100. That is insane. It’s scale, speed, intensity is something we’ve never seen before. China’s demographic collapse is going to be worse than Europe during the black plague or China during the Great Chinese Famine or Germany after WWII. China is about to go into uncharted territory. We don’t know what things will be like on the other side because we’ve never seen it before and we have no model or system to deal with it. One thing is for certain though, China as we know it today under the CCP is going to go away.
As for the US, if it were to continue on it’s current demographic trends, it’ll reach China’s current demographic situation at some point in the second half of this century, that’s a lot of time to figure things out. At that point, other countries such as Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, as well as China would have been decades into their demographic collapses. That’s a lot valuable time to learn from what these countries went through and proceed with more knowledge captiously based on what minimized the damage and what didn’t.
Wouldn’t be Lemmy if there weren’t a comment unnecessarily shitting on the US in the comments section of an article about another country.
Maybe I overreacted, but the person that was shitting on China themselves seemed to just spout US propaganda talking points, when in reality both have huge issues and also their good parts.
If I had to chose, I’d lean in the US’s favor overall, but not by much, thankfully I don’t live in either of them.
What country are you living in that isn’t threatened by some or all of these?
Thank goodness. Otherwise people outside the U.S. wouldn’t know how bad it is there.
The US Supreme court also just overturned Chevron deference. Shit sucks everywhere.
While that is true, I think it is important to note that as bad as our problems are, and some of them are pretty bad, that there are countries that have it way worse than us. China is one of those countries. Some of their problems are genuinely mind boggling. Imagine going through our current problems right now but with an irreversible demographic collapse. It’s nuts to think about.
I dont understand how your post has so many up votes when you said not a single specific thing. Can you explain any of the reasons you say China is obviously in a death spiral?
Is it just a feelings based thing from reading posts on here?
Unfortunately Upvotes aren’t linked to the objective truthfulness of a statement. If they were, fake news wouldn’t be a thing.
Also, what is wrong about having an opinion based on a collection of shared articles. Sure they might be biased and some might even report more details than they have sources for but given enough randomly encountered articles some common truths can emerge.
It’s not feeling based, China is truly going through a devastating collapse that can’t reversed. Take their demographics as an example. Here are some interesting pieces of information about China’s demographics:
How does a country recover from this? This is beyond devastating. In fact, it’s terminal. No amount of authoritarianism or nationalism or desperate wars or anything can save the country from what it’s going through. It’s too late to damage control and there’s really nothing to turn things around. The system is going to collapse, and we’re going to see China’s power and influence disappear from the world stage in the upcoming decades. China in it’s current form under the CCP is going away. Pay attention and take notes because we’re witnessing the greatest collapse in human history.
China could actually do something really cool and intentionally pull in refugees using the ghost cities strategy in combination with BRI. Everyone would like that.
While that would be cool, there literally aren’t refugees in the world to fix China’s demographics. They should still do it anyway, having those ghost cities be populated by people who need a new home sure beats leaving them empty.
Not being able to take care of your old when they can’t work anymore does not equal the greatest collapse in human history. I guess we will see though.
Satire
I mean, scandals like this and “chabuduo” attitude putting health & safety at risk is really nothing new in China. I agree with you in general that certain parts of China are in decline / potential to collapse. Especially economy & environment. But speaking from a U.S. perspective, other aspects are enviable, like public transit.
I’m just saying that I wouldn’t necessarily hold this specific incident up as an example of collapse.
China isn’t exactly the place to look towards when it comes to public transit, there’s way better countries to be envious of when it comes to public transport. Their highspeed rail system by itself is around $900 BILLION in debt. It is so overly built that the maintenance costs and insufficient demand is coming to bite them in the ass. To put things in perspective, this figure is around 5% of China’s entire GDP and it is expected to grow as the years pass by. It’s generally normal for public transportation system to not be profitable and for the government to cover the gaps, but this? This is absolutely insane.
There’s stuff that we could learn from them as a country and vice versa, but this is definitely not one of those things.
Collapse into what exactly? China is really too big to operate as a single country. The USA barely manages it and that requires a huge amount of enforcement.
I could see it becoming a bunch of separate squabbling nation states, the Eastern version of the middle East, nobody wants that.
I think China’s history is the best predictor of where China will go after this collapse. China’s history from the very beginning has been defined by cycles that alternate between a bunch of small warring states that constantly fight each other and giant tyrannical empires that unites them all. You could say the current China under the CCP is another iteration of those giant empires and that after the collapse, China will go back to it’s historical mean of being divided by a bunch of smaller states that fight amongst each other.
From which size is a country too big to operate as a single country? I think cultural identity is much more important than size, and the Chinese government has put a tremendous effort in culturally unifying the land with great success (and great cost; see Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, the relationship with Taiwan, loss of local languages and culture). I don’t see that disappearing anytime soon.
A civil war with a stalemate is of course possible (in fact it’s already the reality), but an USSR style collapse in many different countries is just not something I can see happen.
NATO does.
Yeah that’s not correct
It sure seems correct ✅
Do NATO wants a bunch of random political entities with access to nuclear weapons in your view do they? Considering China a threat does not mean they want China to collapse, they just want them to stop being so antagonistic. Perhaps a bit more democratic.
They didn’t seem to mind when the USSR collapsed. Why would they treat China differently?
Freaking madlads making life interesting. I want it boring.
Things are going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. It’ll be a long time since the world is going to feel stable and boring. So buckle up, we’re in for a weird ride.
We have to learn to better frame the issues. When Japan was ascendant, everyone projected them to overtake the US in economic power and we got all afraid and passed a bunch of protectionist rules about car imports. Think pieces get written about how their economic model was better than the US and the US is a crumbling empire.
But it turned out it was a huge real estate bubble combined with/caused by the demographic benefit coming from a boom generation going into their prime labor years and once that generation started aging out there was a real estate slump and a balance sheet recession that lasted a decade, and they never recovered to the levels everyone was projecting 10 years prior.
Now literally the exact same thing is happening with China and everyone is all shocked. Guess what, it’s going to happen again.
It’s not to say the US will never fall to 2nd place in the global order, but it’s not going to be from some country growing at 10%/year forever, that doesn’t actually ever happen.
Perhaps the lesson that will come from all these demographic collapses will be that economic growth should be slow and steady. Countries that try to rush rising up the ranks of standards of living by doing whatever they can to generate economic growth regardless of consequences will end up trading their long term future for short term prosperity.
Imagine if China and the US collapse at the same time and the EU ends up white man’s burdening us all into a better future
Actually Europe’s demographics are pretty bad too. They’re often overshadowed by China’s, but they’re still devastating in their own right. Most of Europe is already going through a demographic collapse right now, but they’re less dramatic in scale and speed than China’s. They’ll be more like Japan’s collapse, but with immigration… at least that’s the case for Western Europe. Eastern Europe (including Russia) is going through a Chinese-esque demographic collapse as we speak. Interestingly, the US has the healthiest demography out of the 3. It’s not great, but it’s still better than either Europe or China by quiet a bit. The most realistic scenario is that the US will remain the world’s leader in future, maybe to even greater degree than now. At least until other countries like India catch up.
I really really really hope!!
I don’t. As much as I hate the CCP, this collapse is still ultimately going to destroy the Chinese nation. We’re going to see hundreds of millions of people in really unfortunate situations who can’t do much to fix the reality they’re in. That’s something that I don’t wish to see happen.
They’re overpopulated anyway, there’s simply way too much people there. Like at least 400 million people should be removed, so that the world would be better place.