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Comment by papersmith | Hacker News Reader

PRC's government is known to be relatively insensitive to external pressure, but is scared shitless of its own people. China doesn't rely on foreign aids, and contrary to popular beliefs, value from export accounts for a very small percentage of its GDP. This is part of the reason China is relatively unaffected by the current downturn.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052429...

If there's to be any changes, it has to be from within. That's why the government is so paranoid about protests and is spending loads on censorship. Recently it has been going after public interest lawyers, but these guys are much tougher to crack than angry peasants.

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_i...

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You've got to be living under a bridge if you don't think the current crisis is affecting the chinese. It hasn't hit Beijing or Shanghai in a major way but all the manufacturing cities across the southern and east coasts are taking it pretty hard. There has been a sizable exodus of laid off workers leaving the cities.

I don't know what counts as a small percentage to you but exports make up 35-40% of their GDP since 2008. There has been a precipitous drop and changing from an export economy to self-sufficiency doesn't happen in a day. Luckily, the gov't has loads of reserves to weather that storm. But it's still a storm.

One of the reasons unemployment is not higher in the United States is because we have effectively outsourced much of our manufacturing needs to China. When manufacturing needs dropped dramatically, Chinese factories were impacted directly.

At one point, China considered a 9 percent annual growth rate the bare minimum it needed to maintain to accomodate the migrants going from country to city and/or to prevent social unrest (if those migrants could not find jobs). I don't know what their revised minimum growth rate is now - but it is clear China was dependent on its biggest customer, the American consumer.

I don't disagree overall, but I thought that China was relatively unaffected by the current crisis because of its massive currency reserves, which allowed it to ramp up spending and cheap loans.

That's another part of the reason. :) If the hole is too big you won't be able to bucket out the water fast enough.

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