With a $136M market cap and just one mine, I can’t call Claude a mid-tier miner. It’s still very much a junior and that is a good thing.

My experience too. I went to an nearly empty city in 2010 and a in a few years it was occupied with a lot of companies and residence. The only reason it was empty is it was under construction and builders want to gradually lease the office out to world class companies. They were extremely selective. It is extremely fancy as well. The West does not understand Chinese way of construction. Western cities will be under construction for decades and Chinese cities are mostly extension of existing cities. It will be done in a few years. Everyone should have seen chinese construction videos. They were lightening fast. There are busy activities going on so it could be dangerous to live in. So builders prefer to build the buildings before having people living in. A well constructed area with all the proper facilities installed can sell with better prices. There is only one city which is truly empty, Erdos, the place Chengis Khan was buried. It is a mistake of city planning. It started with extremely positive growth of coal production and the city did not realize that the area is too remote and coal industry has been in a decline.

I have a lot of respect for Stockman. However, I feel he is more bearish than he should be. On the side of China, all US and western politicians are trained to hate China. I have been here for nearly 28 years and I noticed an overall dislike of China across the whole society. China seems suffers two sources of hatred from western society. First one is that it has been always on the opposite side of Western allies and present a challenge to the west. Western countries have a general frustration of not being able to control China, like what they have done to India and Japan. The second aspect I feel that white population in general do not think other races as equals. So you can see that any time China has succeeded in doing something, it is always accused of copying US even on something China is doing better.
China’s success in the recent decades is not because of communism. It is because people abandoned communism and chase wealth with great enthusiasm. People work hard to get rich and save a lot of money which can be used as investment. Like my parents for example, their pension is around 7500 yuan a month total but their cash saving is around 800,000 yuans in the bank. There are some mal-investment in China for sure but China does need a lot of construction. If you were in the traffic in China you will agree. In last two decades, China has built huge number of bullet trains, subways and other transportation facilities including rail way and high way to the Tibet plateau. These projects have high demand and people feel really convenient. In the 90s, it was very inconvenient for me to see friends outside of Beijing when I went back. Now I just need to give them a call and many of them will jump on the trains and get there in hours. It is especially helpful when Chinese new year time, like now. As for the pentagon and other western imitations, they sell in China. Chinese in general are reversely racist so they consider white civilization more superior. Copies of the western buildings and even cities sell well. There is a city in South China which copies Paris. So western people don’t understand it and consider it waste but they do bring profit for the builders.
In general, China is not controlled by bankers since for the last couple of thousand years, bankers assume the status lower than prostitutes. People hate them and consider them immoral. It has improved tremendously but not completely gone away yet. If Chinese bankers behaves like the way Wall Street is doing, there will be massive attacks from the people. There have been already many incidents the workers who lost their job or facing job loss killed the people who sold them out.
In the last few years, China has slowed down to less than half of the growth like before. First, the previous growth rate is too high and created imbalances, so it is not sustainable. China also suffers impact of global slowdown as an exporter. In addition, the anti-corruption initiative by President Xi has caused a lot of local officials hesitate to act. They now prefer safety over achievements. This was exactly what happened during 1990-1994, after Deng put down student unrest and started clean up corruption. Officials were frozen due to their fear. However, people on the grass root feel better than before. It is the first time I hear that my father say the leader is OK. It is very unusual. So I feel China will have several years’ slow growth but due to the people’s desire to get rich and the government desire to avoid population revolt, the economy will get through this difficult period. Once the world recovers, China will be better as well. Someone say China is the biggest bubble in history ever. I strongly against this notion since people’s lives have been improved a lot and people have huge savings. In addition, China produces most products people can buy in the shopping centres around the world and enjoys large trade surplus. Bubble economy by definition produce vaporware not real products.

I have seen both worlds. I feel China has a long way to improve especially their perception of their standing in the world economy and their confidence. There will be many up and downs before China is recognized as the leader of world economy. However, the state owned economy is declining since privatize the remaining state owned enterprise is one of the major goals of the current government. However, the way of privatization has changed from selling of the property to distribute shares to the public.

I still have confidence in China and even the world economy in general. We just need to solve the problem of debt in the rest of the world. China in comparison is relatively light regardless how many times the western economists propose the opposite.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF COPPER…
Clive Maund – originally published January 24th, 2016

http://www.clivemaund.com/article.php?art_id=3695

Thanks a lot FranSix, that is very interesting and most likely not something I would have noticed anytime soon.
It sure lines up with my current view of things.

FranSix – Interesting thoughts on the reversal due to the CCI and RSI.

Sorry his name should be sihai Lei not Sibo Lei. Cell phone has a habit of changing spelling.

Another major evidence he mentioned is unusual weakness of dollar in the currency flight in addition to gold strength. This is against FED plan. He thinks this is because major players know the game and move asset outside USD. The foundation of this attempt by FED relies on two factors – relative good US growth and low inflation. If these change, FED can not continue with their game. I am not sure i agree but there are some valid points.