@habits

Highly recommend if you have any interest in China. Below are a few excerpts plus an occasional personal aside: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/chinas-age-of-malaise

EXCERPTS:

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The embodiment of this reversal is Xi Jinping, the General Secretary and President, who has come to be known among the Party rank and file by a succinct honorific: the Core.

I think about Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer…

a leak from a Chinese social-media site last year revealed that it blocks no fewer than five hundred and sixty-four nicknames for him, including Caesar, the Last Emperor, and twenty-one variations of Winnie-the-Pooh.

564 nicknames is a whole lot of cat-and-mouse

China is as formidable as ever: it is the largest trading partner for more than a hundred and twenty countries, it is home to at least eighty per cent of the supply chain for solar panels, and it is the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles

…and I fully expect in 10 years (or earlier), China will have pole position in semiconductors too, regardless of the West’s restrictive efforts

I was surprised how often they spoke about Xi without uttering his name—a single finger flicked upward can suffice—because the subject is at once ubiquitous and unsafe. (To a degree I’ve rarely encountered, many asked to have their identities disguised)

…

Even standup comics are forced to submit videos of jokes for advance approval

China’s advance approval or the West’s fear of cancellation, sometimes censorship can look like a circle…

At his core, a longtime observer told me, Xi is “Mao with money.”

…

The most troublesome thing in China is that the open-mindedness—the ability to learn—has come to a halt. For forty years, we learned things, and then people concluded that China was formidable and capable, that the East is rising and the West is declining, that China is already a big boss in the world. And so we stopped learning. But, in reality, we haven’t even established a society with a conscience.

This is a broader psycho-behavioral trait in human beings I think, in that winners get overconfident and soft (good times breed weak men sorta thing), and applies equally to America/Americans, though America’s recent internal struggles with social conflict and political extremism and COVID are leading to a new degree of self-reflection that I think ultimately beneficial

a thirty-one-year-old former factory worker named Luo Huazhong posted a photo of himself in bed, with the caption “Lying flat is my sophistic act,” he said, professing solidarity with the philosopher Diogenes, who is said to have protested the excesses of Athenian aristocrats by living in a barrel

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In July, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that youth unemployment had hit a record high of twenty-one per cent, nearly twice the rate four years earlier. Then the bureau stopped releasing the numbers. Zhang Dandan, an economics professor at Peking University, published an article arguing that the true rate might be as high as forty-six per cent, because she estimated that up to sixteen million young people have temporarily stopped looking for jobs in order to lie flat

I don’t see much of this when I visit big cities like Shanghai; then again, when I visit Tokyo it’s not like I see hikikomori or “grass eaters” either

If they give you your phone at night, everything is going to be O.K.—they just want to talk to you,” he said. “You can WeChat your wife or your mistress.” But, if investigators keep your phone from you, the odds are you are a target, not a source.

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Xi is said to have spoken bitterly of watching Boris Yeltsin contend with Russian tycoons in the nineteen-nineties. Joerg Wuttke told me, “When Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000, he assembled the oligarchs and said, basically, You can keep your money, but if you go into politics you’re done.”

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But Xi, a Marxist-Leninist at his core, said last fall that state-owned enterprises would “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger.”

I think the American parallel for China’s SOEs is the metastasizing bureaucracy; China SOEs = American federal agencies

ancient expression—“shi, nong, gong, shang”—which describes a hierarchy of social classes: scholar-officials, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants

Hmm…merchants make all the money, and money seems upstream of power in all kinds of modern government systems. And I’m always amused by farmer-virtue-signaling, where Chinese farmers (in the US, replace with “factory worker”) receive superficial respect but are given none of the things that really matter, like financial security or political power.

When the zero-COVID policy was finally abandoned, the following month, the change was so abrupt that at least a million people died in a matter of weeks, according to independent analyses; the state stopped publishing cremation statistics.

Read the full thing and let me know what you think!