Serious accidents would include the submarine sinking, or an incident involving multiple deaths on board.
This question will close and resolve in 2025, to allow information to make its way.
The question covers the time frame of the entirety of 2023, including before and after market creation.
It's hard to choose appropriate resolution criteria. I will resolve this YES if a reasonable person would deem it more likely than not that this happened. I will not bet on this market.
If it becomes very clear that there was a serious accident, this question will resolve to YES early, but the resolution criteria will be much higher than 'more likely than not'.
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@KevinLobLaw luckily you are throwing them off the scent with a carefully crafted know-nothing persona
@Panfilo I should say, because the description does sort of imply that I would leave it open until 2025 regardless, that I'd apply a much higher standard of belief for an earlier resolution. In other words, I'd have to be highly confident that it had happened rather than just thinking that it was more likely than not.
@JoshuaWilkes Just adding on to the pile, Radio Free Asia in this article mentions that Taiwan media started running its own accident explanations after the Times report, based on sources in Beijing. So, even with questions in the first story, the overall likelihood has increased since now both sides are leaking an incident, and simply disagreeing over the incident's details/blame. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-submarine-deaths-10092023041959.html
@KevinLobLaw this is a pretty good summary of where I am at with this market:
https://www.newsweek.com/china-submarine-rumor-uk-intelligence-report-taiwan-1832679
What I would additionally note is that whilst the Hindustan Times and the Eurasian Times that are linked below are clearly reporting on the Mail article rather than corroborating it, the (British)Times also ran the story and it's less clear whether they are just repeating the claims of the Mail directly or have their own source
Market with much tighter resolution criteria
https://manifold.markets/2eb7/will-china-officially-confirm-the-s?r=Sm9zaHVhV2lsa2Vz
Curious to see how or if this will actually resolve, because the specifics of the accident might still allow the PLAN to physically recover and repair 093-417, even if such an accident, which allegedly killed the entire crew, did occur.
So we might be reliant on the PLAN to acknowledge the accident to confirm, which.. well.. it's China(town), Jake.
@ChrisMills I actually think that if the rumours are even remotely accurate I, as a reasonable person, will be confident in saying I believe such an incident took place.
a) it's entirely possible the PLAN would acknowledge it happened, as they did in 2003
b) it would become an open secret in democratic defense communities (it seems vanishingly unlikely the US wouldn't know it had happened)
c) even if news of it were suppressed in China, the loss of an entire crew of submariners would cast a shadow through society that Western media in the country would report on
@JoshuaWilkes Well, my response to Point A would be that this is a very different China than 2003-China, so I would not expect them to be forthright about any perceived military failures, and my response to Point B and Point C is just to wonder whether or not it would get reported on enough by 2025 to necessarily resolve the market as YES.
In terms of circumstantial evidence, it certainly seems to be like there's enough there right now to strongly suspect the rumors that it happened are true, what with Xi Jinping disappearing without explanation before he was supposed to give his BRICs speech in South Africa, and Li Shangfu getting purged shortly thereafter.
Interested to see if this reporting from the DailyMail gets fleshed out elsewhere before the market closes, though.
@Capresis I haven't been able to track down the original source, but in the other market I reported that Taiwan now says 'no comment'
@JoshuaWilkes https://manifold.markets/BTE/has-a-chinese-submarine-crashed-in?r=Sm9zaHVhV2lsa2Vz
@JoshuaWilkes https://www.eurasiantimes.com/pla-submarine-missing-chinas-defense-minister-underground/?amp