China’s Economy After Covid-19

China’s economy will almost certainly achieve Beijing’s real GDP growth target of 5 percent this year, at least according to the official data, barring any major shocks.

Chinese leaders are sending contradictory signals to entrepreneurs and foreign investors at the same time that geopolitical tensions are rising.

A key risk is that Beijing’s worries about foreign “containment” efforts will reinforce the current national security bias over policies to support economic development and they will feed into Chinese leaders’ worst instincts about favoring control and stability.

Despite much hype about emerging technologies and the “digital economy,” China’s economy is still primarily an “old economy.” In the next few years, measures that affect the entire economy will matter more for macroeconomic and financial stability and employment than efforts to lead in the supposed technologies of the future.

China’s Extreme Inequality: The Structural Legacies of State Socialism

With modest income differences and virtually no private wealth four decades ago, China’s inequalities of income and wealth are now almost as extreme as in the United States and Russia.

Despite unusually high levels of state control over national assets and strong fiscal capacity, redistribution of income and wealth is barely measurable. This puzzling outcome is a by-product of China’s highly distinctive political and economic structures, which retain many features of the prior state socialist model.

These structures are designed to maintain Communist Party control, enforce the priorities of the central Party-state, and push rapid growth through high levels of investment.

They include migration controls coupled with state ownership of land, an enduringly large capital-intensive state sector served by a financial system dominated by state banks, a tax base heavily dependent on the scale of production, a fiscal system that favors central priorities and drives subnational governments into land expropriation and property development, and the near absence of taxes on household property and related income.

To cite this article: Walder, Andrew G. 2023. “China’s Extreme Inequality: The Structural Legacies of State Socialism.” The China Journal, May. https://doi.org/10.1086/725576.

Lingling Wei’s personal experience with the opening of the U.S.-China relationship in the 1990s, how it enabled her to pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist, and how the relationship has since become increasingly fraught with tension and hostility due to both countries’ mutual distrust.

I questioned the intentions of the U.S. in a way that now reminds me of the nationalist zealots termed “Little Pinks” in China today.

My American professor encouraged me not to feel let down. “By fulfilling your dream of becoming a journalist,” he wrote back, “you would have an opportunity to get beyond all the political posturing.”

Mutual engagement opened up vistas for millions of Chinese and exposed Americans to a culture that is thousands of years old and a government that, for better or worse, will shape the future of the planet.

The fact that the West won the hearts and minds of so many of us is one reason why Xi, who is more focused than his predecessors on political control and ideological purity, is trying to isolate China from foreign influences.

看到 李老师 发的视频：「一名女生走出高考考场后，主动来到记者面前，并开始背诵《劳动法》」

想起去年的 劳动法是摆设，一年多过去了，现实情况没有发生任何改变。

不过得益于对「依法治国」的进一步理解，与一年前相比，对这一现象应该有一些新的认识。我把这个问题抛给了 ChatGPT，下面是它对于专制政权下法律作用的理解：

In authoritarian regimes, the law indeed can serve as a tool for the government to control and suppress the populace. However, it’s also possible that citizens can use the law to secure certain rights or to challenge unjust actions, even if the effectiveness of this varies. The law can provide a framework or set of standards that the government is expected to adhere to, at least in theory.

This concept of law as a form of “bargain” or social contract between citizens and rulers can be seen as an extension of the idea that even authoritarian regimes require some level of legitimacy to maintain their rule. They might use the law, or the appearance of rule of law, to create a sense of order, predictability, and legitimacy.

However, it’s also worth noting that in many authoritarian contexts, the judiciary is not fully independent, and laws can be applied selectively or interpreted in ways that favor the ruling power. So, the extent to which ordinary people can effectively use the law to protect themselves can be quite limited.

This dynamic underscores the complexity of law in political systems and the importance of factors beyond just the letter of the law, including judicial independence, transparency, and respect for human rights.

How scientism has been weaponized by religious scholars and philosophers to defend their respective disciplines against the encroachment of science. It argues that scientism should not be understood as an overly positive attitude towards science, but rather as a neutral view that scientific knowledge is the best form of knowledge we have.

https://aeon.co/essays/science-is-not-the-only-form-of-knowledge-but-it-is-the-best

Recovering the Lost Smells of China’s Slow Trains

The idea that China’s new, cleaner, less smelly stations and train cars represent an improvement in “civilization” is mistaken. They’re merely a reflection of the country’s ongoing process of social and economic change. From Dezhou braised chicken to instant noodles and McDonald’s, we are what we eat.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013159

这本书的 Preface 写得真好，忍不住分享一下。PDF 在评论区。

Source: White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. 2nd ed. Studies in North American Indian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976957.

Russia’s Perpetual Geopolitics (2016) by Stephen Kotkin

Russia is still the largest country in the world, but it is much smaller than it was, and the extent of a country’s territory matters less for great-power status these days than economic dynamism and human capital—spheres in which Russia has also declined.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2016-04-18/russias-perpetual-geopolitics

也值一个屁

《红楼梦》里，林之孝家的说过一句话：「原来是这事，也值一个屁！」——「也值一个屁」的态度，很多父母身上是没有的，极度匮乏。他们不明白善良、友爱、信心、勇气是比学习重要得多得多的东西，不了解正确的价值观、健康的生活习惯、科学的态度、务实的作风是比分数宝贵得多得多的品质。一旦认同这些，就会知道多少学校是在瞎搞，就会知道多少家长在与学校共谋瞎搞。

2020 年因微信群裏的一句話，我被帶到有關部門，兩天時間裏他們對我說了什麼？做了什麼？是否也會發生在你身上？

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnx2moGbA6k

The Case Against Travel

In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

The End of Optimism in China

One of the hallmarks of the reform era had been a boundless optimism: Tomorrow would always be better than today. And for the most part, it was. With the economy in hyperdrive, the opportunities ahead seemed limitless, while the emergence of new technologies and easier access to international travel and better education made life feel freer, even under an oppressive Communist security state. The Communist Party was able to capitalize on these good feelings to solidify its grip on the country and build a degree of local support.

But recent years have brought reasons for pessimism. The go-go years of China’s economic growth have come to an end, and with them, the easy gains in welfare and free-flowing jobs. Three years of Xi’s unforgiving “zero COVID” pandemic controls, which locked hundreds of millions into their homes or placed them under other restrictions, exposed the regime’s capacity for irrationality and brutality. Xi is sealing off any remaining crevices for free thought with a campaign to reassert ideological and social conformity with the party line—more accurately, his own line, known as Xi Jinping Thought. That effort has brought greater censorship, the suppression of private education, and even limits on playing video games.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/06/-china-pessimism-economy-censorship/674556/

The Double Education of My Twins’ Chinese School by Peter Hessler

In addition to being the most popular app in China, WeChat may also be the most passive-aggressive. Chinese tend to monitor the app obsessively, and they get impatient if a message goes unanswered.

The school had no other American students or teachers, but early on it had been heavily influenced by ideas from the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, had pioneered the concept of the experimental, or laboratory, school.

In the earliest grades, Chinese writing is itself a kind of math: an exercise in basic addition, as characters are memorized one after another.

There are few school vacations in China, and the only significant break in the fall is for National Day, on October 1st. In 2019, children had five days off for the holiday, but they were required to make up two of those days on weekends. Ariel and Natasha’s class was also given thirty-six pages of math homework to be completed during the break.

It also seemed tailor-made for a hyper-competitive society in which citizens needed to be alert. One guiding principle behind Chinese third-grade math could be summarized as: Don’t be a sucker. Leslie said that when you read an American exam you can tell that the writers of the exam want children to get things right. But the authors of Chinese exams are aiming for wrong answers.

If one guiding principle of Chinese primary education was “Don’t be a sucker,” another seemed to be “Fear everything outside the classroom.” This was one of many contradictions at an institution whose name included the word “experimental.” The school’s beautiful campus included basketball courts, a soccer field, a jungle gym, and a track. But I rarely saw children playing outdoors.

President Xi Jinping described the project of educating young people in core socialist values as similar to “fastening buttons on clothes.” He said, “If the first button is fastened wrong, the remaining buttons will be fastened wrong.” Leslie and I realized that there was no need to counteract the propaganda, because our daughters, as Americans, had buttons that were wrong from the start.

Politics was omnipresent, which meant that students often learned to tune out the Party.

As a parent, I liked the systematic nature of Chinese schooling, the specialization of the teachers, and the dignity with which they carried themselves. I also liked the fact that nobody cared what I liked—along with every other Baba and Mama, I was welcome to flush any nervous parental energy down the whirlpool of WeChat.

Xi’s Plan for China’s Economy Is Doomed to Fail

Staple of governance under Chinese President Xi Jinping is that major policies are introduced with great fanfare only to be abruptly discarded, often without even acknowledging their prior existence.

But a great leader needs a great policy, and in Xi’s China there is always a new one.

Sensible though it is, consumption-led growth in Xi’s China is doomed to fail. As Xi has done so often in the past, he will back away from the policy once the inevitable backlash from powerful constituencies, including state-owned enterprises, local governments, and the national security bureaucracy, takes hold.

The Chinese people, knowing that the leader will bury the initiative at the first signs of worry from the party, will be reluctant to embrace it.

A consumer-led economy requires a high degree of individual autonomy and commercial freedom to respond to citizens’ ever-changing wants—requirements that the CCP under Xi has been increasingly unwilling to accommodate.

The policy of consumption-led growth may have been started with the sincerity that typically accompanies ignorance of collateral consequences. But as those consequences become clearer in Beijing, it is destined to suffer the same silent death and unmarked burial as Xi’s previous initiatives.

The Rising China is Not a ‘Sick Man’ Anymore: Cultural Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era

This study explores Chinese cultural nationalism since Xi Jinping became the President, that is, the ways that Xi constructs and politicises culture to serve his nationalist interests.

It first situates cultural nationalism in the global context and clarifies its usage in China. Then the article explains how national humiliation, the ‘sick man’ metaphor, the ‘great power’ narrative, and national rejuvenation provide a broader context of understanding Chinese cultural nationalism.

Applying summative content analysis to examine the government discourse on its website since Xi Jinping became the president in 2012, this article shows that Xi downplays national humiliation and the ‘sick man’ metaphor while emphasising the ‘great power’ narrative and national rejuvenation.

The author argues that this politisation of culture has a strong personal feature of Xi and serves his nationalist purposes in many ways.

Finally, this article discusses the rationales and risks of his promotion of such cultural nationalism and the implications of the study.

To cite this article: Lin, Jason Cong. “The Rising China Is Not a ‘Sick Man’ Anymore: Cultural Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era.” Journal of Contemporary China, May, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2214513.

To Be or To Become a Chinese, That Is a Question

China is its history. In its long history of changes, we can see a more stable “methodological China” compared to the o en-changing Chinese values and beliefs.

It means China exists in its flexible ways of thinking and doing rather than in any unchangeable fundamentalist faiths.

“Methodological China” refers to “exemplars,” “political systems,” “history-based civilization,” “unchanged samples,” as well as the “episteme of Chinese mind.”

To cite this article: Zhao, Tingyang. “To Be or To Become a Chinese, That Is a Question.” China Review 23, no. 2 (2023): 13–29. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/250/article/896050

赵汀阳这句 “China is its history” 让我想到这本书中的一段话 (page xiii)：

> To claim that identities are constructed is not to deny that they could be deeply meaningful. Rather, it is to insist that, in order to capture more fully the complexity of the human past, we must approach the formation of identities not as an aside but as an essential component in historical inquiries. For many, the history of China is, at its core, a history of the realization of the Chinese people as a nation.

To cite this book: Shin, Leo K. The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523953.

A History of Pigs in China: From Curious Omnivores to Industrial Pork

A farmer who doesn’t raise pigs is like a scholar who doesn’t read books. 種田不養豬，秀才不讀書

To cite this article: Lander, Brian, Mindi Schneider, and Katherine Brunson. “A History of Pigs in China: From Curious Omnivores to Industrial Pork.” The Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 4 (November 2020): 865–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911820000054.