At some point in the 1990s, the central Chinese government made it so that profitable things like factories didn’t benefit local government revenue as much because it started going to the central government instead. However, the local governments could still make money by leasing land, and they could make a lot more money leasing land if they built a bunch of cool and useful stuff, making the land more valuable.
https://youtu.be/axRhjqd-rus?is=2rlqM4pMyJ-lJF6R
“Vladimir Putin’s desire to grab Ukraine’s key defensive lines echoes how Adolf Hitler secured Czechoslovakia’s fortifications.
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“Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defense industrial and defensive infrastructure in and around these cities,” the institute said.
If that happens, Russia would move its frontline roughly 80 kilometers further west, while Ukraine would be forced to build new defenses on flat and open terrain in neighboring Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk — far harder to hold than the fortified cities it controls now.
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In September 1938, Adolf Hitler argued that handing over the ethnic-German majority Sudetenland region to the Reich would satisfy his ambitions and end the threat of war in Europe. France and Britain agreed, and browbeat Prague into accepting. Hitler — whose word was as reliable as Putin’s — said he had no further territorial ambitions.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-war-in-ukraine-adolf-hitler-czechoslovakia/
Russia took land from China, then ethnically cleansed the Chinese living there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rBRdzf1fYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7HFVL8c1Q
Russia is unilaterally changing sea borders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDnMYztaxfI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3R-0AiECEo
“foreign investors hold just 3.1 percent of all privately owned agricultural land in the United States, according to the most recent USDA report, which covers through the end of 2021. The numbers vary by state, but overall, investors from Canada own the most, and foreign-owned land was most often timber or forest.”
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“Chinese investors own less than 1 percent of foreign-owned acreage nationwide. The total share of acreage owned by foreign investors and entities has been growing rapidly over the past few decades, but the overall numbers remain small.”