That's why a trade deal with India would actually be quite important. Our trade with India is dominated by services, because India is one of the most protectionist economies in the world. We only export about £5bn of goods a year to India, nearly all of which is subject to tariffs; we could export a lot more if we had a free trade deal.
The Tories will argue that any such deal is a Brexit benefit, but any deal would be led by India, who have in recent years been looking to open up their economy.
>>453742 shipping anything to India is a complete fuckaround. Even moving company equipment to our plants out there is absurd.
Everything about dealing with that country is just shit. Projects and products go there to die.
It's quite possible that other people and companies do it better, or pay the right bribes or something. But fuck me, if trade with India is the answer, the question's not one I want to think about.
Well, yeah. Trade with India is a shitshow, but it's a massive economy with a huge consumer market. If we can get at least some of those tariff and non-tariff barriers removed, we could do quite well out of it. They're hopelessly corrupt and their bureaucracy is a mess, but at least they mostly speak English. Probably won't make up for the lost trade with the EU any time soon, but it's better than a kick in the tits.
Worth remembering that trade with China was a total shitshow well into the early 90s, with most of it having to go through Hong Kong and Taiwan. Half the reason the Hong Kongers are so salty is that they're no longer the gateway to Chinese trade.
Directors of companies outsource to India to save costs, meanwhile having to pay more to cover GDPR eg safe rooms covered by armed guards. They do a business version of a Ponzi to save money but meanwhile the Indians take the money and in essence run. The directors hop to another business just before administration sets in with gilded laurels and cost savings on their CV. Ad infinitum the money and 'productivity' shifts to India.
The economics of India is a scam so wouldn't be concerned.
Mostly, like Singapore, they were a beacon for the free market in APAC and didn't want to lose the freedom involved rather than submit to socialism with capital markets.
Mate, it's 1.5 billion people. They make steel and cars and all sorts. I've been and the bits that aren't designated shitting streets are actually quite nice. Crap outsourcing contracts don't alter the fact that India is full of smart people doing good work.
For as long as anyone can remember, Hong Kong was much, much richer than the mainland. Hong Kong had plenty of social problems, but they could look over at the mainland and know that the grass was very much greener on their side.
The mainland - particularly the cities of the PRD that are directly adjacent to Hong Kong - have been slowly catching up, then caught up and might even have overtaken Hong Kong.
For most people, the issue of political freedoms are pretty abstract. No-one they know is involved in publishing books that are critical of the CCCP, no-one they know is likely to notice any difference in government unless they choose to go out and protest. The change in comparative living standards is very much not abstract.
Thirty years ago, Hong Kongers looked across the Sham Chun river and saw an impoverished fishing village. Today, they see the most economically vibrant city in the world. Hong Kongers see themselves as freer than mainlanders, but that has always been secondary to the fact that they were richer. That's what the Hong Kong identity was built on - the jewel of the pacific rim, the capital of Asian trade, the gateway between east and west. The focus on political freedom is almost entirely a by-product of the loss of economic superiority.
Strangely, I see a lot of parallels with Brexit. People who supported Brexit couldn't actually tell you why being part of the EU was bad, but they blamed the EU for their sense of stagnation, their sense of being left behind by the world. I'm not saying that political freedom is completely irrelevant, but it's a far smaller factor than identity and pride.
>>453763 Any Indian with real talent fucks off overseas asap. I'm sure there are exceptions that stay, and some that emigrate are useless, but it does seem to be the general rule.
Costs are low, but everything is such appallingly hard work. Projects start out with such high ambitions - all these talented Indian teams, all experienced graduates and experienced guys. And then the project gets slower and slower as you realise they just can't / won't deliver.
If you want yet another web app, based on an existing web app, fine, go for it. If you want some actual architecture, competent delivery, grown-up testing, then fuck no. Doubly so for electronic design.
Anyone good you do find, fucks off. You're left with the ones that look good on paper, but produce nothing worth having, or move the project backwards with their awfulness.
There must be a way to do it better than we (and my previous employer) manage. No way on earth has India been anything other than a dump for any R&D we try to put out there. Manufacturing, fine, apart from the pain of doing business, but that's copable with. Actual research, actual development, hell no.
I'm quite bitter, and very glad that this has not been my responsibility. I thought that better comms - Teams and the like, might have helped, but it seems not. They fucking love their progress meetings. Just not actual progress.
Yes. 'They'. I'm othering over a billion people, despite not having met them all.
Eventually, I hope things will improve. With any luck I'll have retired by then, and a billion industrious, competent Indians will make the world a better place.
I saw HK as akin to Singapore - a prosperous market with free trade and free visa around the world to residents with a passport. Go anywhere, trade anywhere.True world ventures without restrictions.
I see China took HK as an economic grab, but also to restrict freedoms and use propaganda to validate this. IN HK you could say the government is shit, try that now under China.
Surely you've all seen how we react every time Jacob Rees-Mogg or someone says teachers should be jailed for not teaching their children to be patriotic enough. Imagine if this country got taken over by a government that was actually serious about locking people up for such things. It makes perfect sense to me for Hong Kong to be angry. This whole economics angle is pure cope and you know it.
I was too young to really know what the score was, and I've never really read up on it, but didn't we used to be in charge (or stewardship, of sorts) of Hong Kong?
Were we wrong to give it back to China? What was the deal with that? Obviously there's basically nobody nowadays who will defend imperialism/colonialism and the British Empire is universally reviled by fashionable internet people with Opinions On Things, but there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and I'm fairly sure compared to China, we were it.
Is there a word for instead of like, neo-nazis or tankies or whatever, I think the world would be a much better place if the British Empire were still about? I mean come on, we only did a bit of genocide when we really had to, other than that we were pretty good overlords.
>but didn't we used to be in charge (or stewardship, of sorts) of Hong Kong?
Yes. We were flogging China loads of opium, which China wasn't exactly keen on. They told us to piss off, we had loads of boats with cannons and that, we took Hong Kong island in the first war and a lump of Kowloon in the second. We ran Hong Kong as a colony from 1841 onwards, apart from a brief blip during the Second World War when Japan nicked it. France signed a deal with the Chinese in 1898 to rent a big lump of the south coast, which the British saw as potentially threatening; We signed a similar deal to lease a big lump of land to the north of Hong Kong to provide our colony with a more secure foothold and room to expand. That lease had a 99 year term.
The communists took over China in 1949, gradually pushing the Kuomingtang forces south until they retreated to Taiwan. They were basically fine with Britain owning Hong Kong as long as there wasn't any funny business.
That 99-year lease turned out to be a bit short-sighted. The majority of the populated area of British Hong Kong would automatically revert to Chinese ownership in 1997. By the 70s, investors had started to get really nervous about the looming deadline and were reluctant to build anything; they obviously weren't especially confident that the Chinese Communist Party would respect the rights of a bunch of multinational landlords.
We definitely couldn't afford to extend the lease, so the Thatcher government negotiated a compromise arrangement - Hong Kong would revert to Chinese ownership on the expiry of the treaty in 1997, but China would allow Hong Kong to remain self-governing for another 50 years. That compromise became known as "one country, two systems" - Hong Kong becomes part of China, but is allowed to govern itself with near-total independence.
That compromise started to unravel in 2012, when Xi Jinping took over as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi is much more red than his predecessor Hu Jintao and opposes a lot of the liberal reforms that occurred under his leadership. Significantly for Hong Kong, he holds the position that the British-Chinese agreement over the status of Hong Kong was never legally binding, something that Hong Kongers obviously disagree with. Hong Kong is still self-governing and that's not likely to change soon, but Xi is very much of the opinion that China has a right to intervene in any matter that threatens the security and stability of China as a whole.
The inciting incident for mass protests in Hong Kong was Dolce & Gabanna forbidding people from taking photos by their window displays. I'm not shitting you, look it up. Rumour has it that Dolce & Gabanna imposed this rule to protect the privacy of customers from the mainland, some of whom may or may not have been government officials with questionable ethics.
The next wave of protests was about "birth tourism" - women coming from the mainland to give birth in Hong Kong so that their children would have the right to live and work in Hong Kong. All of the anti-immigrant arguments we're familiar with were brought into play. Hong Kongers tend to see mainlanders as being chavvy slobs with more money than class, which isn't entirely untrue but doesn't exactly engender sympathy.
The crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong happened in tandem with the rise of anti-mainland sentiment. The CCCP didn't just turn up one day and impose martial law, but there was a slow ratcheting of tensions. Hong Kongers dislike the idea of growing closer to the mainland, but the CCCP is of the opinion that the one country, two systems arrangement will end in 2047 so the Hong Kongers had better get used to it.
>>453780 Hong Kong belonged to us and we gave it back in 1997. However, we were worried that Chinese communists would fuck it up, so we did a deal where Hong Kong would be a bit Chinese while simultaneously being a bit British, so they'd have free elections and not be communist, but they would also pay their taxes to the Chinese government and whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems
We weren't the worst overlords, but there's a lot of bad stuff we did that we don't really talk about. We invented concentration camps, or rather it turns out we didn't but we almost did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_camps >This was not the first appearance of internment camps, as the Spanish had used internment in Cuba in the Ten Years' War, but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.[3]
There were also things like the Amritsar Massacre, but that might be more well-known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre
Obviously any empire has stories like this, but they were definitely bad.
>>453782 >CCCP
You keep doing this. The government of China is the Chinese Communist Party, which abbreviates to CCP. Personally, I never call them this because I don't think they call themselves that and it's not really an immediately intuitive term to read, at least partly because it does look a bit like CCCP. CCCP, meanwhile, is Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, AKA the USSR in English.
While we were knobs, the Chinese had their own problems which made things much worse. No one could actually say to the emperor "look, we're fucked and these guys will bum us a lot". They let their own people down because they couldn't lose face. Japan is a similar case, but they were (eventually) humble enough to embrace and learn from it.
>"So...Hong Kong. You see that shit Xi's selling, about how they now have a chance for "true" democracy? Why don't you fuckers take that place back? C'mon, he broke the deal...England should just take Hong Kong back! Free the Chinese!"
-geopolitical strategist Axl Rose at a recent lecture in London
