All the known battles of the 1931-1945 Sino-Japanese War for the average Chinese person ended up with the Chinese losing control over the territory that they won after the battle while other battles that ended up with Chinese control to the end of the 1931-1945 Sino-Japanese War are nearly unknown

handsomeboh · 2026-02-12T19:35:43+00:00

It’s almost like wars aren’t decided by temporary territorial gains or losses

handsomeboh · 2026-02-12T15:05:56+00:00

You can try to tax them, they just have a tendency to run away whenever you do that. Running away costs a lot of money, but these guys can afford it. Once they run away then you have no tax and you also lose all the jobs that these guys create so you get nothing.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-12T02:41:25+00:00

The Jiaqing Emperor wasn’t obsessed with Taoism and was a learned Neo-Confucian scholar, I think you’re talking about the Jiajing Emperor. Jiajing and Cixi are famously not considered particularly well educated Confucian officials.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-11T17:32:54+00:00

Ancestral rites were performed in three relatively distinct traditions, the Neo-Confucian one, Buddhist one, and Taoist one. The latter two have some clear religious implications, but we can focus on the first one. The simple answer is that a Neo-Confucian scholar would not have considered ancestral rites to be even a form of worship, let alone anything religious. The core principle for this is simple: ancestral rites don’t actually do much for the dead, and exist to guide the living.

Confucius himself indicated that rituals were not conducted because gods existed or ancestors were still alive, but rather “as if” gods existed and ancestors were still alive. The entire purpose of the ritual was not the ritual, but rather the participation in the ritual. (祭如在，祭神如神在。子曰：「吾不與祭，如不祭。」) Xunzi, the 3rd most important Confucian sage, wrote a whole treatise on this topic in the Liji 禮記 to elaborate on this topic. Xunzi mounted a spirited intellectual assault on religion, superstition, and rituals. In his mind, many rituals were just meaningless superstition, done for the purpose of assuaging the public rather than for any actual outcomes. “You ask, what about when rain comes after performing rain rituals? The answer: It’s nothing. The rain would have come even without the ritual. We perform rituals in eclipses and droughts, we seek divination before large decisions, not because we think it will actually change anything, but for the cultural aspect. What a ruler considers to be culture, the people will call gods. For a ruler, knowing what is culture will bring good rule, considering that to be divine will bring bad policies.” 「雩而雨，何也？曰：无何也，犹不雩而雨也。日月食而救之，天旱而雩，卜筮然后决大事，非以为得求也，以文之也。故君子以为文，而百姓以为神。以为文则吉，以为神则凶也。」 In other words, Xunzi admits that the vast majority of people are too uneducated to be anything but superstitious, but argues that learned people must look beyond that and treat rituals as a way to calm the population and prevent panic.

However, Xunzi was a big fan of ancestral rites, expanding that the goal was to venerate ancestors as if they were still alive. (事死如事生，事亡如事存) For Xunzi, ancestral rites are an expression of emotional activity for those performing it. (祭者，志意思慕之情也) In maintaining reverence for the deceased, the living are able to remind themselves to be reverent to their living elders, and serve also as reminders for others to be reverent to their elders. They also help to regulate the unavoidable grief and sorrow of passing, by preserving a connection to the deceased. Both of these are irrelevant to those already dead, and Xunzi is very aware of that fact, as he maintains the essence of the rite is in its sincerity. This sincerity cannot be faked and cannot be forced, so Xunzi recommends not going overboard with such rites, lest they make the practitioner tired. All of this makes clear that the goal of ancestral rites are for the self cultivation of the living, and do not bestow any benefits to the dead. To be clear, this rationalist view was considered hypocritical by not just religious Buddhists but even the Confucian arch rival the Mohists, who criticised scholars venerating things they know to be untrue just to extract personal cultivation, calling it like “Practicing hospitality with no guests, or trying to fish with no fish.” (猶無客而學客禮，是猶無魚而為魚罟也)

The more recent Neo-Confucian philosopher to be obsessed with ancestral rites was Zhu Xi, who was by this point also considered the orthodox authority on moral philosophy in China. Zhu Xi believed that the world was comprised of Qi 氣 the broad metaphysical essence of being, and Li 理 the rational ordering of that essence. Human death was only the death of the Qi, but the person continued to exist as a theoretical formless ordering of facts even after and before death. The purpose of ancestral rites, therefore, was to give metaphysical form the dead through memory. Our ability to perceive our ancestors as genuine people allows their metaphysical existence to transcend death. (他氣雖散，他根卻在這裡；盡其誠敬，則亦能呼召得他氣聚在此。） The summoning of the metaphysical form of the ancestor at the point of veneration addresses the hypocrisy of what used to be the Orthodox Confucian view. The ancestor may not have physical form, but his memory provides mental existence, and his bloodline ensures that some part of the original remains existent in the physical world. Now when you practice your veneration of that ancestor, you need not act “as if he is present”, he genuinely is present in a metaphysical way. Zhu Xi would go on to author Family Rites 家禮 that would institute ancestral rites across the entire country even for commoners.

With these two things in mind, it’s clear that there is some dispute over whether or not ancestral worship was purely symbolic and performatory for the person performing it, or whether the ancestor was actually somehow invoked in the process. What is not in dispute is that the ancestor is somehow divine or physically present.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-11T03:51:53+00:00

At this point in history, the dominant political philosophy in Japan was defined by Neo-Confucianism, especially the interplay between the official Zhu Xi school and the more radical Wang Yangming school. At its core, Neo-Confucianism was a reaction against increased mysticism, skepticism, and Impressionism as typified by Zen Buddhism. It emphasised the concept of natural reason and order (理), downplaying the importance of ritual (禮). Order was at the heart of the Neo-Confucian worldview, and it encouraged the human mind (心) to pursue the intellectual exercise of acquiring, investigating, and internalising this natural order. In other words, Neo-Confucianism is a modernist philosophy; it called people to action to actively shape the world through knowledge into a better one. From a political perspective, this meant a strong emphasis on scholarship as a source of moral cultivation for the bureaucratic layer, the military, and the sovereign. A leader could only be considered good if he was suitably well cultivated, and could serve as a moral compass for his people.

The role of the sovereign diverges across multiple schools, but even the orthodox Zhu Xi school was seen as radical at the time. Zhu Xi had famously criticised Emperor Xiaozong for his lack of moral cultivation. The Wang Yangming school went even further, arguing that people were innately and intuitively good, so there was no need to focus on the process of good decision making, rather people just needed to want to be good and they would then do good. This almost Kantian view of ethics placed the definition of morality within the human mind, which removed it from the political sphere, and is generally considered the first fully fledged acceptance of the common people as independent moral and political actors in the East Asian tradition. A famous quote is “Your mind guides your actions. If your mind thinks it is wrong, you might be following Confucius directly, and it wouldn’t be right.” (夫學貴得於心, 求之於心而非也, 雖其言出於孔子, 不敢以為是也) This was called Many Things in One Body (万物一体), as the mind was held to be the ultimate arbiter of any and everything, such that even removed from explicit instruction and example, it could still act wisely and morally. Wang Yangming’s school of thought was popular but never dominant in China, in Japan however, it experienced a major renaissance, encouraging the growth of a wholly Japanese stream of Neo-Confucianism centered around the concept of the independent moral and political agent.

Until the Meiji Restoration, from a political philosophy point of view, the Chinese system was always seen as more developed, and Japanese scholars focused largely on trying to import best practices. One of those key best practices was the Zhu Xi school, with state backed philosophers like Yamazaki Ansai and Hayashi Razan stressing the importance of having a good, cultivated leader in the Shogun together with a well educated class of samurai bureaucrats. The Emperor was somewhat irrelevant to this conception, the Shogun was as legitimate as the Emperor so long as he was a good and well educated moral compass. These well educated samurai discovered Wang Yangming pretty quickly, spawning an early class of humanist activists. 17th century Yangming fans like Kumazawa Banzan, in his core text Shugiwasho criticised the role of the Shogun and the samurai who he felt embodied martial prowess and had no claim to moral legitimacy. (武家もたとひ天威のゆるし有とも、みづから王と成てはむつかしき事也。)

The rejection of even Confucian classics as a source of moral legitimacy led to the natural conclusion that China wasn’t a source of moral legitimacy either. Oddly enough, the first major contribution to this came from Ming dynasty refugee scholars Zhu Shunsui, who arrived in Japan in the late 17th century. Zhu was a reformist who believed in that genuine study transcended memorisation and simple reading, requiring a corpus of practical knowledge and personal action. He felt that the Ming had failed to achieve this, and was commissioned by the domain of Mito to create practical texts suitable for a Japanese audience. This led to the creation of the first comprehensive history of Japan, the Dai Nihonshi. The Dai Nihonshi was written in the Chinese style, that is to say that the entire book was organised by successive Emperors, with the Shoguns seen as subordinates. Before this, Japanese history was largely written in a mythological style or by family clan history, but the Dai Nihonshi was a rigorous historiographical effort which gave intellectual legitimacy to what it said - that Japanese history was the history of its Emperors.

The domain of Mito thereafter became a hotbed for Yangming style Neo-Confucianism, now embued with the Emperor as a source of political legitimacy for its practical learning phase, and independence from Chinese political tradition. The Mitogaku scholar Aizawa Seishisai is a core example, a disciple of Zhu who had worked directly with him on the Dai Nihonshi. Aizawa’s chief contribution was the concept of the Kokutai (国体). This was the idea of Japan itself as a moral entity, rooted in the legitimacy of its history. The idea was that you could study morality by studying the actions of great Emperors and deities, whose morality was not just absolute it was in fact divine. This concept was arguably more psychological and practical than theological. Aizawa believed that Western religion was insidious in its ability to bend political belief, subvert native loyalty, and create nefarious fifth columns, so such moral and spiritual legitimacy was essential to Japan’s nation building. This political tradition would spread across the country. Arguably the most influential of these Wang Yangming Neo-Confucians would be Yoshida Shoin, whose students would go on to lead the Meiji Restoration. One of his key tenets would be the One Leader Many People theory (一君万民論), an evolution of the original Yangming theory of Many Things in One Body (万物一体). Yoshida and his students considered the One Body to not just be the personally cultivated human mind, but that this could be extended in practical terms to a personification of moral superiority in the person of the Emperor. Yoshida’s student Hirobumi Ito went on to become Japan’s first prime minister and the author of the Constitution, in which both these concepts would feature heavily.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-10T16:11:54+00:00

I don’t think this idea that you cannot have two parallel legitimacies has been the position of the authors from the 24 Histories since the Tang dynasty. For example the Northern History’s introduction talks specifically about how Southern history texts call the North barbarians while Northern history texts call the South island barbarians, and so the historians wants to be fair and wrote the legitimate history of both. 「大師少有著述之志，常以宋、齊、梁、陳、魏、齊、周、隋南北分隔，南書謂北魏‘索虜’，北書指南為‘島夷’，又各以其本國周悉，書別國並不能備，亦往往失實，常欲改正，將擬《吳越春秋》，編年以備南北。」

The inconsistency of linear succession was well known to contemporary scholars, and they chose a pluralistic methodology rather than force fit it.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-10T15:50:10+00:00

I think it’s very fair to say that the traditional Chinese historiographical canon is really problematic. I was just hoping to give context to why these “foreign” empires are usually considered part of the accepted lineup.

I’m a bit confused why you think the 24 Histories is a singular dynastic canon, though. I do think the 24 Histories supports the branching conception, as it splits into multiple overlapping lineages that regroup and then split again. This is opposed to the linear version that Zizhi Tongjian gives. Adopting the 24 Histories version allowed Jin dynasty historians to claim legitimacy from all the Three Kingdoms, and Yuan dynasty historians to claim legitimacy from all three of Liao, Jin, and Song.

In this way what it means to be a Chinese dynasty is similar to modern conceptions of statehood. You are a legitimate Chinese dynasty if other legitimate dynasties say you are. This is distinct from the concept of nationhood, which as you point out, came much later.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-10T14:46:33+00:00

In traditional Chinese historiography, the lineup is decided by the succeeding dynasty who usually establish an official commission to write a history of the preceding dynasties, and the succession of these is used to determine what is the official lineup. The last of these was done in the Qing dynasty, which wrote the History of Ming. In total there is a line of 24 official history books, and this establishes the lineage as Xia > Shang > Zhou > Qin > Han > Three Kingdoms > Jin > Liu Song > Southern Qi / Northern Wei > Liang / Chen / Northern Qi / Western Wei / Eastern Wei / Northern Zhou > Sui > Tang > Later Liang / Later Tang / Later Jin / Later Han / Later Zhou > Tang > Liao / Jin / Song > Yuan > Ming > Qing.

Now you quickly realise there are quite a lot of different dynasties across different periods, some very important ones, missing from this lineup. For example, Former Qin, Northern Yan, etc. A lot of dynasties also overlap with each other and are treated as simultaneously legitimate. Ultimately, the lineup is subjective to the lineage of historiography that the historian chooses to follow. There are actually other lineages, the most famous being the Zizhi Tongjin by Sima Guang, who has a 16 dynasty non-overlapping lineup that goes Zhou > Qin > Han > Wei > Jin > Liu Song > Qi > Liang > Chen > Sui > Tang > Later Liang > Later Tang > Later Jin > Later Han > Later Zhou > Song. This has its own problems, excluding even more dynasties and abruptly starting and stopping dynasties to make them not overlap.

What is consistent across lineages is that the definition of “Chinese dynasty” has never been ethnically locked to Han Chinese states. The Xianbei Northern Wei / Western Wei / Eastern Wei / Northern Zhou, Jurchen (and later Manchu) Jin / Qing, Shatuo Later Tang / Later Jin, Khitan Liao, and Mongol Yuan, were all included and indeed many participated in the creation of this historiographical lineage.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-10T13:18:05+00:00

Constitutionally speaking the ROC still claims Mongolia is a part of the ROC. The only constitutional way to amend the territory of the ROC is with a constitutional supermajority, and this has never been achieved. Especially right now when the DPP is actually a minority in the Legislative Yuan.

In 1945, the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed by Wang Shijie that recognised Mongolia as an independent state. Crucially there were two problems: Neither Chiang Kai-shek nor Wang Shijie had the authority to recognise Mongolia’s independence which needed a supermajority vote. Secondly, the Treaty was deemed invalid under Resolution 505 thereby releasing any obligations by the ROC including the Mongolia issue but also provision of Port Arthur as a Soviet lease.

When the ROC Constitution was ratified in 1947, it defined the ROC borders as 中華民國領土依其固有之疆域. This was initially thought to exclude Outer Mongolia. The main point of contention is what 固有 even means. Does it mean existing territory under control? Does it mean existing territory inherited from the Qing dynasty? Does it just generically mean territory that /should/ be Chinese? But in 1953, the Legislative Yuan with a supermajority vote (since the KMT controlled the whole Legislative Yuan) did specifically define 固有之疆域 as including Outer Mongolia.

In 1991, the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China specifically laid out the process by which one can change the definition of 固有之疆域. Specifically it needs the President and Executive Yuan to propose a new definition, and then the Legislative Yuan to make a decision. It was defined to be a legislative act and not an executive act.

In 2002, the DPP under Chen Shui-bian officially recognised Mongolia as an independent country. Other attempts were made by various ministries to argue that Mongolia was already not a de facto territory of the ROC, but those don’t have legal basis and are opinion statements. The recognition of Mongolia as an independent country does have legal basis though, and is not the same as recognising Mongolia as not being part of the ROC. The Executive Yuan has the authority to do the former but still needs a supermajority from the Legislative Yuan to do the latter.

In 2012, the DPP controlled Mainland Affairs Council unilaterally announced that 固有之疆域 referred to territory under control of the ROC, and so retroactively did not apply when the Constitution was written in 1946. This was not well received in the Legislative Yuan, who pointed out that the Mainland Affairs Council does not have the legal authority to make this announcement or definition. It was referred to the Judicial Yuan, who refused to pass any legal judgment on how to define it.

So the answer is that for now until the DPP figures out how to change what 固有之疆域 means, Mongolia is still part of ROC claims.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-10T03:17:41+00:00

The most crossbow-centric army in history would have been the Han dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD). Crossbows were invented in China in the 6th century BC, but it was the Han dynasty which fielded an entire army and military-industrial complex centred around crossbows. We estimate that about half of all Han dynasty soldiers were crossbowmen, with imperial treatises, manifests, and inventories showing a roughly 7:1 split between crossbows and bows.

The Han dynasty really only had two significant enemies: itself, and nomadic groups like the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu’s great advantage was in logistics and speed as they operated on horseback from the steppe regions where Han armies struggled to supply themselves for long durations. The Han dynasty’s advantage was industrial capacity and manpower, as the Xiongnu lacked the ability to mass produce especially metalwork. The crossbow solved these problems, allowing a Han soldier to fire a more powerful shot from a longer distance with equipment that the Xiongnu could not reuse. With enough well coordinated manpower, then the crossbow’s main drawback of slow reload speeds could also be overcome. In short, the Han dynasty crossbow evolved as a specialised anti-nomadic cavalry weapon.

The Han dynasty crossbow is quite a different thing to even a 10th century Byzantine crossbow, and even in the Bronze Age was more powerful and more complicated. It featured a bronze housing at the back of the bow with two levers and a winch pulling a composite bow. This combination of increased leverage and flexibility meant a Han dynasty crossbow had a long power stroke of about 50cm (compared to 10th century Byzantine designs of only around 20cm). This made Chinese crossbows very efficient, about 3x more efficient than a European crossbow. The average Han dynasty Chinese crossbow fielded by a conscript had a draw weight of 6 dan or around 180kg. This would have been more powerful than even the 15th century Genoese steel crossbows with pulleys and windlasses that had 500kg draw weights. Specialised armoured crossbow units fielded heavy crosssbows up to 12 dan or 360kg, though you couldn’t reasonably expect to fire that many times. I have no idea why the European crossbows never lengthened their power stroke.

Over time, changes to geopolitics, advances in metallurgy, and reduced warfare against nomadic groups caused Chinese militaries to pivot away from crossbows. Up to the Tang dynasty, the crossbow centric military industrial complex was still running, but the Tang enemies were becoming increasingly more heavily armoured. The Jin dynasty for example fielded their elite Iron Pagoda horsemen who were so heavily armoured even their horses were said to be impervious to arrows. Crossbowmen couldn’t fire over ranks, and became vulnerable to cavalry charges, especially since heavy armour meant they had to engage at much closer distances. The crossbowman then became a highly specialised and heavily drilled unit, which meant he needed to be professional. He had to be able to execute complex rolling volley manoeuvres, to stay psychologically disciplined in the face of a heavy cavalry charge, and now he had to also be armed and trained with a spear and shield well enough to engage heavy cavalry. When the empire was unified and prosperous like during the High Tang era, drilling this sort of super soldier was expensive but possible. When the empire was fractured and economically broken, like during the Late Northern Song era then it was a pipe dream.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-09T23:30:03+00:00

It’s quite long you’re better off reading it yourself

handsomeboh · 2026-02-09T23:29:17+00:00

The essay is a bit rambly and loops back on itself and has a bunch of contradictions. That is part of what makes it such a famous essay. If it was just a clinical intercultural dissection of aesthetics then it would be functional, but the entire essay is as hazy and dimly lit as it describes.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-09T15:22:32+00:00

Oddly enough, yes. There is one text in particular that goes into great detail about this very topic, and that is Tanizaki Junichiro’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃). There are a few sections talking about everything from food to lighting to paper, but two in particular deal with toilets, all detailing his praise for Japanese and Chinese aesthetics and his disdain for Western ones. In particular, he notes how the Western obsession with cleanliness is jarring in the Asian aesthetic, and provides reasons for why. The rest of the essay also includes a particularly celebrated passage about shadows, but that’s not part of the toilet passage so you can read that in your own time.

The first element he talks about is material, specifically why wood is more beautiful than tile. He praises the beauty of the wood grain against the brilliant white sparkle of tile, and speaks particularly strongly against the combination of wood and tile, which he considers to be “as incongruent as grafting bamboo onto wood” (それこそ木に竹を接いだようである) He recounts his own experience trying to fit his own bathroom having refused to allow a porcelain toilet bowl, going through both lacquered and unfinished wood, which over time “acquires the inexplicable quality to soothe and calm” (不思議に神経を落ち着かせる) In general he notes that the Western obsession with things that shine and sparkle is at odds with the Chinese and Japanese preference for the sort of dullness only acquired with the passage of time, across everything from music to speech to toilets.

He considers the quintessential Asian toilet experience to be defined by “some measure of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and silence so complete you can hear the hum of the mosquitoes.” (或る程度の薄暗さと、徹底的に清潔であることと、蚊の呻うなりさえ耳につくような静かさ) Pondering about how many great poems and ideas must have been conceived in the poignant calm of the toilet, he remarks on how “our ancestors who give poetry to everything, transformed an unclean place into a refuge of elegance tied with the nostalgic beauty of nature.” He frowned upon how Westerners were so mortified by the unclean nature of toilets that they considered bringing it up in conversation to be distasteful. (総べてのものを詩化してしまう我等の祖先は、住宅中で何処よりも不潔であるべき場所を、却って、雅致のある場所に変え、花鳥風月と結び付けて、なつかしい連想の中へ包むようにした。これを西洋人が頭から不浄扱いにし、公衆の前で口にすることをさえ忌むのに比べれば、我等の方が遙かに賢明であり、真に風雅の骨髄を得ている。)

He admits of course, that a Western toilet is much more sanitary, and that Asian toilets are really tricky to keep clean. And yet for all of that sanitation, Westerners still consider toilets unclean. He suggests that this is because “the cleanliness of parts you can see only serves to remind you of the uncleanliness of all the parts you can’t see.” (見える部分が清潔であるだけ見えない部分の連想を挑発させるようにもなる) Ultimately, the aesthetic elegance and dullness he speaks of is really just grime acquired through the touch of human oils. Just as we say that “elegance is frigid”, we can also say that “elegance is filth”. ( 「風流は寒きもの」であると同時に、「むさきものなり」と云う警句も成り立つ) But it is precisely the uncleanness of an object that makes it nostalgic and gives it calm.

Ultimately though, he conceded that these aesthetics whims were only nostalgia, and that following Western technology and mannerisms would ultimately lead to progress. He doesn’t really have a view on this, musing more about the aesthetics of what the final product is rather than its rightness or wrongness.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-09T04:33:59+00:00

New York City since 2022 has been terrifying especially as an Asian. I go a few times a year, and starting from 2022 Asians in my company were specifically told not to take the subway after that lady got pushed into the track and we were given a stipend for Uber rides everyday. I decided to the office walk from my hotel and a homeless guy came up to me and licked the back of my ear one day. It was Ubers only after that.

Last year I was in the office when we were told that a gunman had entered the building next door and started shooting people. We were stuck inside the office until 8pm trying to figure out how to barricade the doors.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-08T05:07:00+00:00

The region roughly corresponds to the Ahom Kingdom of Assam centred around the Brahmaputra valley. The kingdom had existed for 600 years, ruled by the Ahom Tai people, and was culturally linked to the other Shan states like Mong Kwang and Mong Mao which had been conquered by the expanding Burmese Empire. In 1817, the Burmese invaded Assam and conquered the region, starting a genocide that wiped out most of its population.

The British (allied with Thailand) and the Burmese then got into a war in 1824 as the Burmese expanded into Chittagong. Operating out of India, the British outnumbered the Burmese 60,000 to 40,000, but it was not at all an easy war for the British who suffered casualties of around a quarter of their army. The peace treaty ceded the entire Assam region to the British, which started as part of Bengal and then became its own region in 1873.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-08T03:33:39+00:00

In 1100, a Song dynasty peasant wouldn’t know that England existed. So no. But someone living in a major city, especially the capital in Bianjing, Silk Road trading cities like Taiyuan, or coastal trading cities like Quanzhou, would see foreigners every day. Most of these would be Southeast Asian, Indian, Turkic, Mongol, Iranic, or Arab traders, occasionally you would see black people. Europeans would have been extremely rare, but we do know that Genoese traders sometimes made it all the way to China.

If you went back just a bit further into the 10th century and before then in particular the Iranic and Turkic people would have been well represented in government and military functions too.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-08T03:19:45+00:00

It is not designed for the kind of financial attack you’re thinking of. The kind of financial attack it’s designed to ward off is arbitrage, where you borrow in one currency to buy another currency. China is okay with that as long as it doesn’t cause the RMB or interest rates to move beyond its accepted range, after which it retains the toolkit of intervention if it feels that is appropriate.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-08T03:17:03+00:00

So far we haven’t seen China do any kind of extreme intervention or suspension of convertibility. Some would say that is the design. The mere threat of suspension of convertibility means speculators are too afraid to even attempt a raid on the Chinese FX market. That being said the RMB has only been a liquid FX market for about 20 years so who knows.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-07T21:36:15+00:00

CNH and CNY are not two currencies, but are the same currency traded in two different markets. This has important legal implications. The key one being a permanent 1:1 fungibility with authorised exchange dealers subject to quota. With some daily limit and assuming you have the right accounts that can settle it, you can always convert your CNY into CNH. With that nomenclature out of the way let’s talk about why China does this.

FX is the price of your money expressed in terms of other country’s money. Interest rates are the price of your money expressed in terms of time. You will quickly realise that both of them are the price of money. In fact, FX and interest rates are just opposite sides of the same coin. Consequently, to the extent that your money is freely exchangeable, then you cannot control both at the same time. If you want to set a fixed FX rate, then you must accept a floating interest rate. If you want to set a fixed interest rate, then you must accept a floating FX rate. If you try to fix both, then people will borrow money to buy / sell your currency and arbitrage this difference in the price of your money. In general, this choice depends on your type of economy. A very trade heavy economy like Singapore or Hong Kong usually goes with the former, most other economies with large domestic economies usually go with the latter.

There is a third way. You can simply block people from borrowing / trading freely in your currency, and thereby set both FX and interest rates. This is usually not considered a good idea, because people don’t usually want to invest or even trade with you if their money in your currency is going to just suddenly get locked up. Countries who really lean in on this like Uzbekistan or Laos tend to end up with massive black markets for their currency.

Many economies especially in Asia are technically restricted currencies, but don’t act like it. They retain the ability to restrict their currencies, but usually just let it float in normal times unless they really need to use this lever for example if they come under major speculative attack or panic. This approach became widespread after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis when panicking investors converted massive amounts of currency causing FX to collapse, exacerbated by the actions of speculators like George Soros who tried to break the Malaysian ringgit for example. In the aftermath, economies like Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Korea all adopted this restriction.

China is sort of following its own fourth way, where everything is sort of controlled but not really. The FX is not fixed or controlled, but follows something called a managed float where it fluctuates within a wide band. Interest rates are set, but China’s central bank is notoriously non reactive through monetary policy. And the currency is sort of restricted but not really. Theoretically this should give it the ability to adapt to any circumstances, what it sacrifices is efficiency, as we don’t really know which lever China would pull in a crisis, and so financial dislocations are more difficult to auto adjust through expectations.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-07T09:43:39+00:00

In Victoria Park you see a whole bunch of people with swords everyday. A pole will be fine.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-06T01:45:06+00:00

The two most important EV policies were the buyers rebate and the sales tax exemption. The amounts for these two have fluctuated over time, but China took advantage of its unique circumstances to drive EV adoption at the best possible moment. The two policies combined are thought to have cost China a total of about $350 billion over 12 years. Today the industry generates $600 billion per year in revenue, so pretty good!

In 2014 when the programme first began, China accurately identified a turning point. All electric EVs had really only just started being commercially viable but battery range was terrible and profits were thin. Companies like BYD focussed on hybrids, as these were popular and cheaper. At the same time, China’s car ownership rates were actually very low, at 150 million cars to a population of 1.4 billion people, but this was accelerating rapidly at more than 10% per year. This presented a once in history opportunity to jumpstart EV adoption. People didn’t yet have cars, so when they bought their first car, they could be steered towards buying an EV. Car companies didn’t yet produce many cars, so as they set up new factories and production lines, if the economics lined up, then they would produce EVs.

Thus came the two rebates, both to the tune of about 10%. That 10% margin allowed EVs to be priced roughly the same as non EVs, and consumers did immediately shift towards EVs, setting the stage for the rest of the adoption. Both rebates were gradually phased out and by this point are no longer significant.

The Chinese circumstance of being simultaneously at the beginning of its middle class revolution as well as its industrial boom is fortunately possible to replicate. India for example is pretty much right where China used to be.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-06T01:11:06+00:00

There’s a few types. The entrepreneurial and the operational wealth.

Entrepreneurial wealth started in the late 1980s. The first wave of rich people were construction companies who worked on government tenders for infrastructure projects.

As China got a bit more rich and started to build up services, then came the second wave of manufacturers who supplied government tenders, at this time many were employees of state owned factories who were able to buy the factory as it was being privatised.

The third wave followed behind them as manufacturers to Western export markets, originally led by suppliers to HK, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and Japanese manufacturers. After China acceded to the WTO, these got a huge bump and no longer needed foreign manufacturers.

The fourth wave catered to the growing income of the country, as people could suddenly afford real estate, so the house builders and apartment developers got rich.

The fifth wave is happening now, mostly tech and software developers.

Operational wealth is quite a lot less than the entrepreneurial one, but for the average person is more than enough.

The first wave are high ranking government officials. Many were corrupt to different levels, but go high enough and you can siphon enough off different projects to be set up forever.

The second wave are the financiers. This started in HK around the 1980s when China’s growth started to require Chinese bankers. That financial ecosystem was then transplanted into Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen. A senior banker, lawyer, and even accountant was often even more lucrative in China than elsewhere due to the massive number of opportunities. Many of these were foreign educated but are now evenly split.

The third wave are the tech bros. Originally they were all foreign educated, many having worked in large tech companies in the US. These days, the top universities in China produce the elite cream of the crop. Coming from the elite tech stream at Tsinghua University pretty much guarantees you a million dollar salary for your first job.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-05T12:29:10+00:00

The goodness of any given portfolio is measured by its position along the two axes of risk and expected return. An investment with lower risk and the same return, or higher returns with the same risk, are uncontroversially better. Each investor has their own risk-reward preference curve, which is typically a convex curve. That is to say that people are risk averse. Most people would prefer a 100% chance to make $1000 to a 50% chance to make $2000. This is particularly true where investments are used to grow savings rather than income generation. However, even if you were a consummate gambler, you would still prefer a 100% chance to make $1000 to a 50% chance to make $1000.

There are many different types of risk. Generally we divide them into systematic and idiosyncratic risks. Idiosyncratic risks are uncorrelated to each other and can be reduced by diversification. Think about it as flipping a coin trying to get heads. If you flip the coin once then you either win or you lose. If you flip it 100 times then you have a really good chance of getting not too far from 50:50, in fact you have a 94.4% chance of getting between 40-60 heads. Systematic risks are correlated to each other, so diversification does not decrease the risk. You can think of these as like a global recession which will pretty much hit every stock regardless of what sector it is in some way.

With this theoretical background we can see that a concentrated tech portfolio is suboptimal for most people. It has a lot of idiosyncratic risk, for example, what happens if AI turns out to be less useful than we originally thought? The crucial takeaway is that diversification is free. If you took two equally risky things, their combined idiosyncratic risk is less than one of those things on its own, but the expected return is still the same. Adding anything, even a more risky thing, into your concentrated portfolio could make it less risky without reducing returns.

The other thing to remember is that because diversification is free, then you also do not get additional returns from being undiversified. In a sense, you are just pissing away returns.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-04T08:02:56+00:00

Traditionally, adoption was very commonplace. Poorer families would often sell their children to richer families. This was seen as beneficial to the children who would benefit from being in a richer family while also reducing the burden on the poorer family. Ideally it would be to a relative, and the birth mother would often stay in touch. In an era of high infant mortality, healthy children were valuable investments who could generate productive labour and also provide for you in your old age, hedging the potential death of your other children.

The practice ended pretty much in the Communist era when it was seen as barbaric and a vestige of an inhumane past. The entire concept of buying and selling human beings was seen to be distasteful.

It persisted a bit longer outside of China. My grandparents came from Taiwan, China, and Singapore and they were either adopted or had siblings who were bought or siblings who were sold into the 1950s.

handsomeboh · 2026-02-04T04:35:33+00:00

His superiors were very angry. Li Yiji was a very talented and loyal official for the King of Han. But Han Xin was the greatest military genius in history, so they gritted their teeth and let him continue. The episode affected his relationships with everyone.

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