Zeng

First, I don't count infrastructure as pure expense. Infrastructure has great value for any country and it is great that Beijing gets the new infrastructure. The value of the infrastructure will surely increase.

I never studied financial, but as I heard that the Asian game village in Beijing has increase its value several times now.

Great city deserves great culture and sport centers as well as associated facilities.

Second, I hope that the game itself balances itself out financially. But I don’t consider pure financial statistics show the true value of the Olympic game even if it can not balance itself financially.

Great country and great city deserve the great legacies. Holding Olympic game is one of them.

Third, it forced China to open up for scrutiny in one way or another. The constructive criticism will improve China to better direction.

Great country should have the tolerance to accept the constructive criticism.

Fourth, the civil campaigns in China for behaving more polite and more civilized for Olympics will improve the behavior of our people. The campaigns for learning foreign languages for the Olympics will give more people a chance to contact the rest of the world.

Great people should have their proud to facing the world in a respect way with confidence.

__________________
I am here for exchanging opinions.

Fiona Shrot

I cannot understand your words exactly, perhaps because my reading ability is too weak.

Ok, anyway, lets continue our interesting discussion.

BTW, you mentioned you never studied finance. It doesnt matter, because the conceptions I am talking about are very common ones.

Firstly, you think the infrastructure should not be taken into consideration and believe their value must increase in the future.

For one thing, it is a kind of the government's spending, which belongs to fiscal policy. You see, nowadays China's economic market is quite differnt from two years ago and the goverment's aim is to control the the inflation and its effect. And the central bank and the Ministry of Finance did somethings for it, such as, successive increase in saving interest rates. Nevertheless, because of the rising of the RMB's value, the gap of the interest rates between China and US, international hot money and so forth, all of these policies received little effect and some failed completely. However, in the meanwhile, the infrastructure's building and re-building in Beijing are contrary to the whole environment and the policies I mentioned above. CCP has to continue its steps, but we here should account its cost to the economy.

For another, every investment has its opportunity cost. China decided to use the money to improve the road conditions, the air pollution, and the like for Beijing people. So a big big big opportunity cost comes. This huge amount of money, why not for our lamentable students in rural areas in Henan Province? Why not for villeges affected deadly by the desertification in Inner Mongolia? Why not for the lung cancer patients in the smoky and highly polluted Lin Fen in Shanxi Province? I bet even 100 yuan can improve their conditions a lot, due to the law of diminishing marginal utility and leverage effect. Ok, tomorrow you will see a more beautiful and "harmonious" capital, but millions of the poor are still struggling for life. Do you still think it doesnt matter?

In your posts, you mentioned the Olympic Villages twice. Well, it is quite good that you see the price is increasing at present. However, you havent seen its future. On one hand, did you ever think about which factors are making the price growing? One crucial factor is the coming Olympics this summer! But what will happen after that? I am not sure, but Hu said, it would be very difficult.On the other hand, the prices of real estate in Beijing and Shanghai are very unreasonable according to many indexes. I dont know what the price will be in the future, but if it keeps growing like this, the two cities will face some terrible problems. Besides, I learned about the Olympic village from my roomate. Her father is one of the officers who takes charge of the whole project. I have to keep some things as secrets, but I can tell you that even he is worrying a lot about it.

Secondly, you alleged that financial methods wont show the value of the Olympic 2008. I admit that if everything grows just like what China expected one year ago, it can bring the country a good reputation, its citizens long-lost confidence and blur blur blur as what our media used to publish. However, 人算不如天算(ren suan bu ru tian suan./Man proposes, God disposes.) Just have a look at the tough torch race.... Then may we come back to the talk about financial balance? I just used a simplest model.Though it still needed hypothesis of unknown Xs, we can see this Olympics may get deficit finally.

Thirdly... I can not get what you mean. What do you think is the constructive criticism? How to build the membrane structure of the Water Cube?(I also studied civil engineering for six months. Frankly, this membrane structure is not as beautiful or creative as the one of Allianz Arena) Or the "weight" of the Bird's Nest? If you refers to criticism to Tibet issue, my opinion is like this: I wish it should have come earlier and I dont think it has much directly to do with the Olympics Games. Just for Olympic Game2008, it is a bad news.

Fourthly, many Chinese have a strange logic. I saw too many posts saying something like "we are looking forwards to Olympics and dont spit on the ground" and "many foreigners will come so that please be more polite". Being more civilized is good unarguably, but it is very silly to do this just for Olympics and foreigners! So what will they do when the fall comes and the foreigners go back? Each Chinese should know that she should do it for herself, rather than for "face" showing to foreigners and do it every day, every minute and every moment, rather than a mania merely before one Olympic Game!

In fact, I appreciate your positive attitude. However, pls dont lose your ability to appraise events objectively, or rather, dont get blinded just by your enthusiasm.

Thanks.

PS: Id better remind you again, when you talk about Great city(Beijing) next time, dont forget the following places: Shan Xi, Nei Meng Gu, He Nan, and Tibet. And what you can do for the nation is not only telling people "great...,great...,great...".

Zeng, I never did it, but I used to donate money to poor pupils for two years before I left for Ireland, and I am applying for an intern in a charity organization in mainland of China.

__________________
Cinderella was a Chinese.

Fiona Shrot

It is your own decision which news you give attention to.
And I dont think the news is very good for the Chinese

Zeng

Fiona Shrot,

Sorry, I am not proud of my English writing. Probably, I didn’t express myself clearly.

Your post is long and I will probably make a long response too but not necessarily responding every of you point.

I expressed my opinion of supporting Beijing Olympic game and I am glad that there are different opinions for the Olympic game among Chinese people. I consider that it is a progress and Chinese people start to have more and more diverse views for such a magnificent event.

We have a little bit different value system and we are looking things from different angles. I think that not necessarily any of us are correct or wrong on some of the issues we don’t agree with each other. Things normally can not be judged by just white and black two colors.

First, you put big percentage of your comments on the economic side which is by no means wrong. But I wouldn’t look at Olympic game in that way.

Second, you brought out an issue that other places need money urgently, such as poor kids in rural areas and cancer patients in polluted cities. It is great that you are still thinking of them while you are on the other side of the world. I really feel proud of you and totally agree with you.

But I think that a nation needs to balance the 2 ends. It needs to save the poor and it also need to pursue the best.

The historic experience told us, for a civilization, for a race, for a nation, it was its best end to represent its height and usually it was its best end that eventually pulled the poor end high.

If only consider to save the poor end and stop to pursue the best end, then, almost non great man-made wonders, whether they are spectacle palaces in Europe or Forbidden city in China, or Taj Mahal in India would exist.

There were huge number of poor people existed at that time when those man-made wonders were built. I should say that it was very unfair to those poor people at that time. However, their involuntary sacrifice helped human civilization to progress.

Through building those man-made wonders, some outstanding human beings challenged their intelligence to the limit and created/refined technology and science. That is why we call those man-made wonders the gems of human intelligence.

The technology and science pushed world to develop faster and faster and eventually save more poor people. That is the way the human civilization progressed.

If human race tried to save every poor from very start, we will be probably still living in the caves today.

Contrary to the education in China that ordinary people created history, unfortunately, almost none of the people who left marks on the history was really ordinary. They were extrodinary in good or bad ways.

It was the combination of a small number greedy rich/powerful people plus a small number of outstanding human minds that made the greatest contribution to the human history.

In modern world, we can not and should not ignore the poor people. We need to save them. China will have poor people in at least next 50 years. Then, should we stop pursue best thing for the next 50 years before every poor Chinese saved?

Here I talk about the balance. I personally consider it was too early for China to apply 2000 Olympic game. China was not rich enough for such a luxury event. I personally consider 2008 is good enough for China to do it. Should we wait a little bit more? May be, but it is not critical.

Personally, I even think that it is better to have Olympic game now than in the future, because we need some huge mental impact to wake us up to the real world as soon as we can afford.

The torch rally has told us a lesson how tough it can get/will get for China to enter the world stage. After the emotional period passed, Chinese people will make some deep thinking.

Why all those happened?
Do we have some responsibility for that?
Did we deal with everything in the right way?
Should we expel the journalist from Tibet?
Can we develop a more transparent and internationally acceptable way to convict those who committed crimes of setting fire and attacking innocent?

We will lean our lesson and gain our experience. Next time we will deal with this kind of situation better.


For your comment, “人算不如天算 (ren suan bu ru tian suan./Man proposes, God disposes.)”, in most of the cases, it was those things that we did not expect that give us the great discovery, new understanding and new knowledge. If everything goes well as calculated, it means we are repeating totally known things. We hardly learn new things from it.

Challenge yourself into the unknown is the greatest way to learn new things. Not every challenge we took will be successful. Some of them will be successful and some of them will be failure. We directly benefit from our success and learn lesson from our failures.

Challenge yourself does not mean to be over adventurous. It means taking calculated risks. You study finance. You must understand what is the calculated risks. Of course, for an event as complex as Olympic game, the calculated risks can not just be simply calculated. But there is a way to measure it. For us human being, we have fuzzy logic brains that each of us can make some kind of risk evaluation although not necessarily always correct. My judgement is that the risk is in the acceptable range for China to hole 2008 Olympic game. I welcome you to have your judgement.

Today, Chinese is already pretty rich. You probably can not image how we came to oversea. Spend most money buying cloth and flight ticket. I brought less than $200 and a box of clothes with me and came to the new world that I knew no body except my professor who visited me once while I was in China.

However, coming into totally unknown and made fool of myself countless times, I also leant alot. Comparing to those jumping south border, probably my experience is worth nothing.

I repeat myself ” A country’s rising is not an easy thing. Avoiding difficulties should not be the spirit of Today's China. Challenging ourselves to the difficulties and overcoming them should be the spirit of Today's China.”


Constructive criticism (建设性的批评), please read definition in the link below:
Critic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

他山之石，可以攻玉 (the stone on the others mountain can carve the jade). We need to humbly listen the Constructive criticism and improve ourselves, although this is easy to say but hard to do. But we need to learn to do it in easy way or hard way.

We learnt it in the hard way when western countries knocked on our door with gun boats. Right now, if our attitude is correct, we can learnt it in easy way.

I believe that Beijing Olympic game will give Chinese people a chance to get rid some bad habits. People need some strong mental impact to change bad habits that have been so used to them for so long.

Just some disturbance in the torch rally has made so many our Chinese people so emotional across entire country and spread over the world. You can image how strong the mental impact that Olympic game will give Chinese people.

The recent event made me spiritually much more closer to China than ever before. I start to worry about it everyday. I pray that no more bad thing happen there. I wish China run stable and faster. Many Chinese people will get this kind of feeling. When the emotional period passed, we will review our behivor and become better person. This will become the nonmaterial wealth of China from this Olympic game.

Besides the economic consideration, Olympic game is an opportunity to improve ourselves mentally, spiritually, culturally, socially, politically and more.

I personally believe, once people changed their bad habit, some of them would not go back. You can disagree with me on that. But let’s wait and see if my prediction is correct.

Plus together, I stayed in Japan for nearly 2 years. Japanese are still proud their Olympic game and some of them even consider 1964 Tokyo Olympic game as the beginning of the modern Japan.

How to make best use of the Olympic game depending on the people in that country. I consider that Japanese made wise choice to make the best use of the Olympic game. As an oriental society, they opened up to the world, build world class sport centers in Tokyo and opened super high-speed train that marked a new Japan stepping onto the world stage.

On the other hand, I saw less effect on 1988 S. Korea Olympic game. My personal feeling is that they are little bit too nationalism and did not open up enough for the best using of the Olympic game.

I am a little bit worried about Chinese nationalism today and hope that nationalism can change to more rational direction.

In fact, I appreciate your cautious attitude and don’t want to persuade you to change your opinion. Although we have different opinion about Olympic game, I know that in the heart that you love China just as much as I do.

Thanks.

PS: 平均主义 (Egalitarianism) does not work for people, does not work country and does not work for cities. If other cities want to become the next great city, they need to work hard to apply 2xxx Olympic game or whatever great event.

We should not let the best missing its opportunity because others can not get it. We should encourage the best becoming even better and others try to chase it.

Even in the richest countries in the world, the honor of holding the Olympic game belongs to only limited number of cities. Los Angeles did not refuse Olympic game because Detroit was in depression.

You may argue that America don’t give much federal fund for the Olympic game in a specific city like China, which is probably true.

But China is the one that made special economic zone very successful. We give special treatment to certain cities at certain period to make them rapidly grow, then, next city, then, next city. It has been a proving success for a developing country that doesn’t have the resource to develop all the cities at once.

A little bit surprise to me, I hardly met young Chinese still advocating 平均主义 (Egalitarianism). However, I would like to encourage you to keep your opinion until you really be convinced that it has some problem.

Yes, "great...,great...,great..." are the spirit. The "great...,great...,great..." I used there is not saying that they are "great...,great...,great..." now. I am saying that they should make their goal to become "great...,great...,great...".

Without that kind of spirit, China will always be a mediocre just like it is now. Even if China can never become great, but its goal should always be becoming great.

Fiona Shrot, again, I really feel proud of you for what you did and I can also be proud to tell you that our Chinese community here always gathers money sending to China’s disaster areas although not much. Also, almost all my Chinese friends here in US donated some money to Katrina disaster relief. A percentage of my pay check directly goes to United Way (an American charity organization) every 2 weeks to serve my American community. All my colleagues do this. Some of them give more than me. So, I don’t deserve special proud here.

My job will get busy again very soon. I probably will not come to visit and make comments on this site very often in the near future. Have a nice stay here on the WAB and good luck to your study and intern application.

Ray

Too confusingly!!

Too much of Chines obfuscations and polemics!

Keep it simple!

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

Zeng

Ray Sir,

The emotion created by Olympic for us is very complex. I don't know a good way to keep it simple.

I wish that you will get a chance to experience it in your life time.

Also, this post is writing to Chinese people here and you are more than welcome to skip.

Ray

Fiona,

Your post #47 is a bit matured for a 20 year old!!

While you are right in many respect, but then national pride sometimes is stupid, but nonetheless cannot be wished away. Therefore, Beijing, or for that matter, Delhi does get over importance in the resource distribution than places where it is more sorely needed.

Yet, you are the right type of a pragmatic mind that is essential for China rather than the party line spewing Chinese that one meets.

With people like you, China is going to go places!!

mthambi

You can't really include the $14billion cost of infrastructure. If you do that you also have to add in the ongoing benefits like rental streams from apartments built, tolls from roads built etc. They all have net present values which have to be factored in.

Anyway there are financial intangibles like the benefits to companies (both foreign and domestic) due to the branding effort. The increased sales bring in increased tax revenue for the govt. With all the protests going on it is unclear whether this would be positive anymore, though.

My point is that it is very hard to do an accurate financial analysis. But look at it this way: Add up everything (not including the whole infrastructure cost) -- let us say $5billion. That is 0.15% of china's annual GDP ($3.2trillion from CIA factbook). Ask the average Chinese whether he/she would spend 0.15% of a year's income for Olympics and the answer is likely to be no brainer YES!

-manu

Ray

My apologies.

I did not know that China has bought this forum from Rochen!!

China is surely going places!!

The world at your feet, what ho?

goodamanda

In my opinion, if you want to communicate with chinese, you'd better post in Chinese forum with Mandarin.

Fiona Shrot

Welcome to WAB, Mthambi!( Or should I call you Manu?)

And I am very glad that your first post was written to reply my post.

You talked about the percentage of the spending and the annual GDP. It's a very Chinese way actually. In China, the government likes to emphasis on our rocket-like GDP(after all, the data are not bad)

However, there is three huge problems behind the superficial number of GDP. Guess what?

One: GDP is not a REAL GDP. I mean, it doesnt take the inflation into consideration. Do check the CPI index in China. Or use the GNI instead of GDP.

Two: GDP is not the gross product of the CHINESE. We absorbed so much FDI in the past decade, nevertheless, much of their profits are being transfered back to their home countries. So the GNP << GDP. And GNP can interpret how much new value China gain more clearly than GDP.

Three: GDP is a gross number. When you would like to learn about one country's development, you cannot only check economy indexes. The population has to be concluded. Dont believe in the alleged number of only 1.3 billion and that the speed of its increase has been controlled very well by one-child policy. The cardinal number is much bigger than it, and the growing rate is also very quick! So even though China's annual GROSS domestic product growing rate is about 10%, its great effect vanishes when you think about the "AVERAGE" number.

Besides, China's GDP is based on huge natural resources consuming, bringing so much pollution that needs to spend a lot of money to deal with; the growing of the population gives the society a heavy burden to frost so many citizens....

In short, the Chinese people dont get much more benefits from the GDP, especially this year! 2008 is very tough for the Chinese! No matter luxuries or necessities, their prices are rising like a rocket(I like the word "Rocket", because of Yao) If one never know these but only look at China's GDP number, I think she is very childish!!!!

I knew it was impossible for me to count the financial balance accurately( I already said in the first post " I am not sure about it.") How can I, a junior on campus, get all the unknown numbers? I was just estimating it, and thinking about the worst result and the best result.( One can know its interval more or less)

Olympic Game2008 is a big project and China's gorgeous party in my eyes. Before the party, we need to do the project managing carefully; and after it, all friends go back and it is still the Chinese who deal with the next. So I want to and need to be more prudential, not for boring financial analysis, but For My People!

Fiona Shrot

Thank you a lot, B'wana!

I know Beijing is China's capital, but I still feel very sorry for those who live in poor areas. Did you ever hear this saying? When you come to the eastern coast of China, you feel you are in Europe; While after you come to the western part of China, Oh, only 2500km, you come to Africa!

Fiona Shrot

maybe...百度贴吧之"9又4分之3站台吧"(a Chinese forum called Platform 9 3/4) just joking...

goodamanda

I have a question.
Does the mandarin really look like a series of square in the eyes of other people?

Fiona Shrot

I agree! Especially when it is traditional Chinese.