01/10/24 - Weekly Roundup!
About a dozen or so high ranking military commanders were arrested for corruption lately, including the commander of the Rocket Force, and the head of the Armaments Department. This is actually only the latest round. I remember a big round of arrests around June, and another big round earlier in February, but I can’t find the names of exactly who was involved anymore.
There’s a lot of speculation of conflict between Xi Jinping and second-generation military commanders as a group. There are even some conspiracy theories about a foiled coup, but I’m not sure how much merit is really in it.
A lot of parents in Shaanxi are protesting, because kids from the neighbour state of Henan are moving to Shaanxi to take their high school entrance exams. Henan is known for being one of the states with the toughest competition for college entrance exams. Henan high school students have to in class, studying, by 5:50AM and school only lets out at 10:00PM. They have one of the highest admittance scores for getting into college, because Henan itself has so few universities and yet so much population.
Neighbouring Shaanxi has much less population and generally better universities, and is trying to combat the ageing population problem by putting out a lot of policies that make it easier for out of state people to get a Shaanxi hukou. So a lot of parents have found this loophole, and are moving their kids into Shaanxi to get into better universities.
This is screwing over native Shaanxi kids. These protests have actually been going on since a couple of months ago, and back then, the government promised to crack down on student immigration, but lately, it’s been discovered that local schools are still admitting Henan kids. So now parents are mad and protesting in front of the government again.
After big pay cuts all around for doctors, now teachers are getting all their bonuses cut too—in the case where they’re still getting paid at all. Multiple cities have been late on teachers’ pay checks for several months.
There’s been a lot of people celebrating Japan’s earthquake on weibo, gossiping about how bad the rescue and relief efforts are, how much better China dealt with Gansu, and generally saying that this is karma for dumping nuclear waste water. The government is actually going out of its way to censor these types of posts, including suspending a Hunan TV host for these types of comments. Of course, that TV host has instantly achieved viral status on the internet, with a lot of people flocking to his social media account to express support.
I have seen, like, probably hundreds of conspiracy theories about Epstein island in the past couple of days on weibo. “They’re breeding girls on the island for this type of use.” “They’re eating people on Epstein island!” to hilarious conspiracies like, “There’s actually a massive interconnected continent-wide subterranean network of mole people who manufacture humans for the entertainment of the rich elite and there’s a detailed faction map of what levels of membership gets you into what areas, see my 24GB document on the Epstein island expanded universe.”
The most popular discussion, of course, centres around just exactly what Hawking did there.
There’s been a soft ban on celebrating New Years [that is, January 1st, not Chinese New Year] all around the country, for some reason. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the CCP has against New Years. The popular theory right now seems to be that they just hate fun.
Not only are people getting arrested for setting off fireworks, but in order to prevent private celebrations of the New Year, various cities are putting on official New Years celebration parties that attract tons of people, only to announce that it’s been cancelled at, like, 11:55PM. Leaving a lot of angrily people who stood in the cold waiting for 3-4 hours.
The government’s also announced that they won’t be enforcing any time off for Chinese New Year except the precise day of. A lot of people are furious on the internet, saying, “Serves you right that Korea registered the Lunar New Year as their cultural heritage. How can we claim this is our holiday when we don’t even give any days off for it?”
A 13-year-old middle school student has been found dead in his school in Ningling, with injuries all over his body indicating deliberate torture before death. Or, at least, that’s what the family claims. The government has thus far refused to produce any security camera footage or an official coroner’s report. If you can stomach it, here’s a documentary covering the whole case, where you can see partial photos of the boy’s body. To my eyes, there are very deliberately placed, evenly spaced injuries along his arms that don’t seem consistent with the official story, which is that he threw himself off of a roof because of stress. But I dunno, I’m not a coroner.
The family claims that their son’s had a history of being beaten up by his teacher before, and they suspect he was abused to death. They claim that he was dead for 9 hours before the school contacted them, but the school knew about his death beforehand, because they wouldn’t let kids who were in the same dorm as him go to their dorm room that night, and instead made them sleep on their desks in the classroom.
The parents and grandparents of the child protested in front of the school, which quickly drew a crowd. The crowd grew to the size of well over 10,000 people as they began to march on the government building in protest. They also tore down steel gates and got into the school, where they beat up the vice principal and made him kneel down and apologise.
The government’s been bussing in out of state cops to disperse the protestors and arrest people.
There have been a couple of articles from CCP official media, talking about the topic of, “Why aren’t young people willing to spend the money they’ve saved away? What does the government need to do to get people to be willing to spend?” After a couple thousand replies of people wondering, “What have we done to give you the impression that we have savings?” the government’s hastily deleted the articles.
In a similar vein, after massive backlash online about the new video game policies, and a big stock market panic, the government’s hastily came out with the announcement that, “Woah, woah, people, it was just a suggestion. We can still discuss this. None of it is going into effect right now!” And followed it up by firing the Propaganda Minister. A lot of people are generally hopeful about this, as a good sign that the government cares enough to back down. As people pointed out, they certainly didn’t back down on the One Child Policy back in the day, no matter how much people protested.
Zhifubao, one of China’s biggest mobile payment platforms, sort of China’s version of PayPal, was nationalised. Theoretically, the founder and owner, Ma Yun, voluntarily gave it to the government. In actuality, yeah, right.
The latest development in healthcare is that now, the exam to get your medical license is going to include Chinese Medicine knowledge. Even if you’re a doctor practicing modern medicine exclusively. Meanwhile, in order to get a medical license to operate as a Chinese Medicine doctor, you still don’t need any actual knowledge in modern medicine.
An interesting statistical analysis I saved during the week:
“China doesn’t have an ageing population problem. We’re all worrying over nothing.
Based on China’s official statistics, there are 250 million old people in China. It looks scary, but if you look closer, you’d see it’s not a big problem at all.
Because China has a big gap between cities and rural villages. And there’s a big gap if you’re a civil servant versus if you’re not. And this class difference has completely nullified the threat of an ageing population.
China’s urbanisation rates were pretty low in the past. In 1959, only 18% of the population lived in cities. So 70% of these 250 million people over 60-years-old live in the countryside, accounting for about 175 million people.
Base social security pay in rural areas is only 55 RMB a month. That’s only 1% of the social security pay you get as a civil servant. So basically, the money we spend on these 175 million old people is actually only equal to 1.75 million standard social security pay checks. That’s a number small enough to be discounted.
As for the other 75 million, most of them are going to be non-civil servants living in medium to small cities. Their average social security is only 2-3K RMB. That’s only about 30-50% of what civil servants get. So they’re only getting 25 million standard social security pay checks between them.”