How About That PRChina "Leadership"?

Oh, yah. Totalitarianism is SO good!

China’s state media once trumpeted the trains’ top speed of 210-236 mph as the fastest in the world, but the trains were never designed to run above 186 mph. In April, they were slowed accordingly. Caxin.com, the website of China’s leading business and finance publication, reports that the “high-speed bubble” was all a “naked, systemic lie,” concocted and fanned by the Railways Ministry.

Meanwhile, most Chinese citizens cannot afford to ride the shiny new trains and have opted instead to pack into buses for their long-distance travel.

Obviously, PRChina lacks lawyers and accountants, or the trains would be full of them, like the Chicago/Milwaukee run.

...Chinese government planning hardly equals a winning investment. According to a recent report by the Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent think tank in Beijing, the average return on equity of state-owned industrial enterprises in China was much lower than that of their non-state counterparts between 2001 and 2009.

When preferential government subsidies (such as free land and cheap loans) for the state firms are factored in, the real return on equity registers at an embarrassing -1.47%.

Moreover, 70% of all net profits made by China’s centrally owned enterprises in 2009 are derived from merely ten companies that have been bestowed heavy market advantages by the state.

By the way, those are NON-Union enterprises.

Barnum was right: there's a sucker born every minute. Here's ours:

President Obama warned in his 2011 State of the Union address that China’s meteoric economic rise threatens to leave America in the dust and exhorted Congress to substantially increase federal investments to increase American competitiveness.

Such thinking ignores the serious problems lurking beneath China’s economic glitz and spending onslaught. To combat the financial crisis, Beijing pushed out a 4 trillion yuan ($619.1 billion) stimulus package and encouraged lending by state banks that totaled, by some estimates, 20 trillion yuan ($3.1 trillion) in 2009 and 2010. Two years later today, Beijing is staring at piles of bad debt that may imperil China’s broader financial health.

Should we pursue the course apparently advocated by Obozo?

...China’s state-directed capitalism presses forward without any political accountability and imposes inherent obstacles to the free market. The country continues to produce not just persecuted religious believers, jailed political dissidents, and a censored media; it is also home to immense waste and jarring inefficiencies.

Totalitarianism: looks great on the outside. Deathly on the inside.