China's Environment, Society & Propaganda

Unique trains are critical infrastructure in regions with limited transport options. They offer rural farmers efficient ways to move products, which supports their income and growth. Social trains offer accessible transportation for farmers and their goods, positively impacting rural areas. Lower transport costs allow farmers to retain more profits and grow their agricultural operations.

Chinese high-net-worth individuals lead in art spending of $100,000 per year. France follows with a median expenditure of $38,000, while Italy, the UK, and Hong Kong trailed behind. 

Still feeling the stones. Xi this week: “What should not be changed? Our basic political system and supporting systems are mature now. The People’s Republic has been established for 75 years the People’s Congress for 70 years, and the Political Consultative Conference for 75 years – do they still need major reforms? Where would further reforms lead? We shouldn’t reform just for the sake of reform, nor should we reform blindly. What must not change? Take economic system reform for example. For things we are confident about and have thought through carefully, we should implement top-level design; for things we are uncertain about and that are not yet mature, we should cross the river by feeling the stones – these two approaches should be used in tandem. Reform is a journey of exploration full of unknowns.

The Message Board for Leaders connects folks to their local and ministry-level government officials. Since 2006 it has handled 3 million demands, concerns, and complaints. The 12345 hotline fields more than 50,000 contacts a day in Beijing alone, addressing and resolving over 85% of concerns of everyday life. Beijing included in its 2022 priority list 17 “major frustrations” of local residents, including insufficient elevators in old buildings and inadequate residential property services. Almost 100 policies were subsequently introduced, 400 key tasks were completed and 1,322 were installed.

Video: DARKNESS OVER URUMQI: THE JULY 5 RIOTS

China travel tip: if you have international roaming privileges with your mobile provider (in my case, Google Fi, which I highly recommend), then you can use your phone in PRC with no Great Firewall blocking. No need for VPN etc. The firewall only affects local accounts.. I use my phone as a hotspot – my laptop then has regular access to the Internet. 5G speeds and coverage here are excellent.  It might be useful to have a local number here (eg so Didi driver can call you; maybe for train tickets?). Ideal setup would be a cheap local SIM card together with your international roaming plan. Toggle between them using e-sim.

13 pro-natal measures, including: People in flexible and new forms of employment and rural migrant workers, who have already participated in the basic medical insurance scheme for urban workers, will be included in the country’s maternity insurance scheme, according to the document. New mothers and fathers can feel more confident taking time off work, as the document urges local authorities to ensure the implementation of maternity, childbirth reward, paternity and child care leave policies. A childbirth subsidy system will be established, and the country has pledged to increase related personal income tax reliefs.Labor pain relief and assisted reproductive technology services will be added to the list of services that qualify for medical insurance reimbursement, according to the document. To increase the accessibility of child care services, child care services centers will be established at the prefecture and city levels, and child care facilities will be planned, constructed, approved and delivered for use in step with newly constructed communities, the document says.Capable localities are encouraged to raise the limits of loans from the housing provident fund for families with multiple children to support them in purchasing homes.

Archaeologists unearthed a 5,000-year-old tomb, the largest and most richly furnished tomb from the Dawenkou culture, which ruled parts of modern-day central and eastern China from around 4,300 to 2,500 BC. The burial artifacts include pottery and jade ornaments (including a jade burial mask that pushes the timeline for this type of ornament back by 2,000 years) and pig jaw bones, a symbol of wealth during the period. It includes objects from the Liangzhu culture, from the lower Yangtze River; the Qujialing culture, from the middle Yangtze; and the Hongshan culture, from the Liao basin in northeastern China.

Facing an Aging Population and Financial Challenges, Hospitals Are Converting to Senior Care Facilities, a case study made by Luoyang government in Henan province, from Fred Gao, is well worth reading!

Starbucks streamed a six-episode mini-drama on Douyin, a new advertising approach for global brands in China, where the size of the micro-drama industry reached about $5 billion in 2023. Released with one episode per day, the short drama is set in ancient times, in a society unfamiliar with coffee. 

Guide To Finding Supreme People’s Court Materials: Selected Journals Of Spc Divisions, by Susan Finder. Susan has been observing the Supreme People’s Court for over 30 years.She is a member of the international commercial expert committee of the China International Commercial Court (CICC) of the Supreme People’s Court.

The Communist Party of China has 99.2 million members, of whom 8% are full-time Party-state civil servants. 26% of all members joined under Xi Jinping.

What Are Politburo Study Sessions and why are they so Important? The Politburo began holding collective study sessions in December 2002, to enhance the Party’s governance capacity by creating a culture of learning that would build consensus and knowledge around policies favored by himself and other members of the elite Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). For example, the readout of a session on blockchain technology in 2019 instructed cadres to follow trends in blockchain development, improve their ability to utilize technology, and make China a great power in cyberspace. Sessions are meant to improve practical outcomes as well as indoctrinate cadres in Party ideology. Collective Study Has a Rich Political Heritage..

Beijing has punished 589,000 people for discipline violations YTD, including accepting or offering bribery, of whom 53 were ministerial-level officials.  2,972 cases were transferred to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said.

Regulators are removing social media accounts that use fake information to hype the country’s military strength, including false reports of “cyberwarfare” in the South China Sea. A sample Doujin  post from June: Breaking news: China and the US engaged in 12 hours of cyber warfare, causing Luzon Island in the Philippines to lose all GPS, communication and phone signals! Another featured a video delivering an in-depth explanation of how China had won in its rivalry with the United States, thanks to a Huawei breakthrough which upgraded China’s radars.

Higher education enrollment tops 60%, up from 30% in 2012. 10.42 million students were enrolled in 3,074 universities, colleges and vocational schools nationwide. Beijing tops the country with 92 higher education institutions. In 1949 80% of Chinese were illiterate.

Shanghai has 261 medical hospice facilities with 1,224 beds in medical facilities also available for hospice care, while the service can care for another 1,800 patients in their homes. The city has created hospice service standards and regulations, IT-based management and quality control and innovation.

Twelve regions now include cochlear implant surgery in their insurance programs, a game-changer for China’s 27 million-strong Deaf community, many of whom have been unable to receive cochlear implant surgery due to its prohibitively high $65,000 cost–of which governments will now pay $50,000. America’s Medicare first included the procedure in 2022.

From 2018 – 2023, rural area income growth has been stronger than urban: about 35% over five years vs 25% in urban areas. The policies to reduce the historically large gap between urban and rural areas seem to be showing results.  The latter can be seen in the data for the urban-rural gap which has been steadily decreasing:

Planning a trip to China?  For phone service, I used eSim (you have to have a fairly recent, top-end phone) and Airalo (a company that provides eSim services) and my phone was perfect throughout. You don’t have a Chinese phone number, or any phone number, but you have WeChat and WhatsApp and can phone through them if necessary.  I use Astrill VPN, but did not turn it on for my phone, because what eSim and Airalo do is connect you to Internet service providers in China, so of course I did not want to block that. Google services worked like a charm; I could even listen to Spotify on the Beijing subway.  The only downside was that a Chinese phone number remains necessary for certain apps, and you don’t have one, but there are sometimes workarounds if you are persistent. Foreigners can now pay via WeChat (Weixin) and Alipay: enter your credit card number and you’re ready to go.  There are a couple of bugs but, in my case, it worked 99% of the time. (From David Ownby) 

Freshly discharged from Zhongshan City Hospital, Jerry Grey writes, “The total cost for my stay, 4 nights, 5 days, all my food, treatment, scans, doctor’s fees, was $778, AUD$1115, or £595. The biggest difference is, doors and windows are left open while examinations are going on, as a foreigner especially we are objects of curiosity and I’ve even had visitors peer around the curtains drawn around my bed to see what I’m doing – this is not very dignified if, for the first time in your life you’re attempting a big job in bed and not able to use one leg to help you”.

YTD, 3 million Taiwan people have entered the mainland,, up 68% year-on-year, while the number of Taiwanese citizens applying to settle in the mainland has exceeded the total of the previous 10yrs.Above: The 19th Route Army during the Shanghai War of 1932.

Environment

Beijing announced a $2.5 trillion energy-saving and environmental protection industry by 2030, raising non-fossil energy consumption above 25% of the total national energy consumption, and utilizing 4.5 billion tons of major solid waste annually.

A Giant NGO will Turn Waste Into Resources, as the country promotes upgrades to industrial equipment and consumer good trade-ins to boost the economy. A senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, said that the commission “supports the establishment of a national resources recycling group to create a functional resource recovery and utilization platform,” the first official statement on the new state enterprise.

Propaganda

Westerners constantly speculate about what Xi Xinping is thinking– a man who has literally published volumes of Xi Xinping Thought. They speculate about where China is going–when the party publishes five-year plans. You never see this covered, instead you get mendacious morons imagining what is happening in China, and other morons nodding sagaciously. They start every story from their own ignorant assumptions, with no context or conscience. Beneath all the repeated lies is one constant truth: China bad, us good! 

Contrary to conventional wisdom, China’s state media excelled at boosting international support for its political and economic systems. Compared to the placebo group, exposure to Chinese messages tripled the proportion of respondents who preferred the Chinese political model to its U.S. counterpart, from 16% to 54%. The exposure also nearly doubled the preference for the Chinese economic model over the US one, raising it from 30 percent to 58 percent. Head-to-head, global audience preferences still shifted toward China, albeit less dramatically (from 16 to 32 percent in the political domain and from 30 to 40 percent in the economic domain).China’s influence operations possess a distinct edge in molding global attitudes in its favor. The Diplomat.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited people of Chinese descent from moving to the US and made ethnically Chinese already in the US ineligible for naturalization until 1965. The results:Chinese exclusion reduced the white male labor supply in Western states by 28%, suggesting that Chinese workers were creating a substantial multiplier effect in the economy out west;The Act reduced the total manufacturing output of these states by 62%;The Act reduced manufacturing establishments in these states by 54-69%.

Jerry Grey: I honestly can not legally write positive articles about China if I’m Australian, British or American because they have laws related to ‘foreign influence’ If I say anything positive about China and I am paid by China to say it, I’m breaking the law unless I register on a list that I have been paid as an influencer. Those laws were created to discourage people from making positive comments and statements about an ‘adversarial’ country. China has no such laws. If I’m published and paid for writing something positive about the UK, there are no issues with that but in Australia, the USA and the UK, I may have broken a law designed to prevent me from doing it.  There are several people in Australia currently awaiting court cases, or in prison after falling foul of the Foreign Influence Registration Laws. So much for freedom of speech!