I have a brother in Alaska. Nome? Sure, he's my brother. I mean Nome in Alaska. I'd know 'em anywhere! (Thank you Abbott and Costello)

The difference is that when capitalism fails we have income inequality or we have government strangling innovation. When communism fails we have real slavery, massive imprisonment of dissenters, and countless executions.

Also for taking the risks. Many people who aren't wealthy don't lack the hard work or intelligence to get rich, they just prefer to have a stable secure paycheck and prefer not to go through the years of thankless work trying to launch a business when you don't know when or whether it will succeed or fail.

And of course with the modern nanny state many simply prefer not to deal with the piles of regulations that must be followed when running a business.

While outside my family we encourage democracy and equality, inside our family it is authoritarian communist dicatatorship - as it should be.

Yes, rather than genocide for everyone, now it's only for those who aren't Chinese. That's a 20% improvement, I guess.

And of course "themselves" always includes their latest conquests (China didn't get so large by fighting "amongst themselves") and next conquests "xxx has always been an integral part of China and is strictly an internal affair".

Japanese has one sound that is somewhere between the R and L sound. It isn't exactly either.

assuming you mean Mandarin Chinese (the official language of the Chinese empire), there is an L sound, and there are multiple R sounds. Depending on where the speaker is from (which part of China, Singapore, or Taiwan) an R sound might come out sounding like L or it might not be pronounced at all.

In terms of information theory, Japanese is like Binary, English is like Decimal and Chinese is closer to duodecimal. Japanese has very few consonants and vowels, and is limited in how they can be combined to form syllables. So just link binary where you have few symbols, you have to use more symbols to convey information. English has a lot of consonant and vowel sounds, and we have few limitations on how we combine them, so our words and sentences generally have far fewer syllables than the equivalent Japanese. Chinese has a lot of vowels and consonants too. They have some restrictions on how they are combined, but they make up for it by having four tones that can be applied to create different syllables. Chinese sentences and words are - in my opinion - generally slightly shorter than English, and it sometimes sounds like the speaker is having a hard time molding his mouth to make the complex syllables that come out slowly. Meanwhile the Japanese speaker is rolling out one syllable after another so rapidly I can hardly distinguish them - yet both communicate the same information.

22,000 volunteers are a great labor/troop source. 22,000 kidnap victims are a dangerous potential source of unrest, rebellion, and loyalty to the enemy.

You don't have me convinced but you do have me wondering. It's been nice talking with you.

One thing I want to thank you for: some years back I heard a Taiwanese person claim that China had sent a lot of former KMT soldiers to do the fighting in Korea as a way of getting rid of the potentially disloyal troops. I've often wondered how true that claim was. Both the article you linked to and articles I found while looking in to your statements seem to confirm that there were a lot of KMT soldiers in the prison camps, which at least partially answers the question.

It's an interesting read, but difficult to tell what the source is. Part of it seems to be saying that KMT soldiers who had been captured while fighting for the PLA were responsible for the coercion. This seems plausible because coercion is how KMT armies generally recruited and KMT military leaders would consider it normal, especially after being coerced themselves to fight for the Communists. However, the sections claiming that ROC leadership was involved seem more dubious to me. While the ROC was certainly not above the tactics described, the ROC was terrified of a fifth column in Taiwan. Surely they wouldn't want to coerce a 22,000 man fifth column into entering Taiwan!