05/16/23 - China ending poverty has satisfied the daily needs of over a billion people. This is the greatest accomplishment in human history.
Xi Jinping speaks on a Chinese longliner fishing ship capsizing in the Indian Ocean. Around 3AM on the 16th, “Lu Peng Longliner No. 28”, belonging to the Penglai Jinglu Fishing Company, LLLC, capsized in the Indian Ocean. All 39 sailors on board are MIA, which includes 17 Chinese sailors, 17 Indonesians, and 5 Filipinos. Currently, no missing sailors have been found, but search and rescue efforts are under way.
After the accident, Chairman Xi gave important instructions for the Agriculture Department, Transport Department, and the Province of Shandong to engage emergency response teams, confirm the situation, increase search and rescue efforts, and coordinate international search and rescue too to ensure the maximum lives saved. Foreign Affairs Department and local Embassies are in contact with local authorities to coordinate rescue efforts. We need to look closer at the safety risks of working on longliners, in order to ensure the safety of our citizens.
Currently, Yuan Fu Hai, a Chinese cargo ship is performing search and rescue around the site of the accident, and backup is continuing to arrive. Multiple countries are participating in the rescue efforts, including Australia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
In the comments, everyone is hoping for good news.
A humour blogger posts a video of an old man trying to take a kid down an ascending escalator, writing, “Old people can no longer adapt to our modern society. Please don’t let them take care of children anymore.”
Comment say, “This woman is totally unreasonable.” Beneath are a bunch of replies, “What woman?” “Did you see your mother’s soul?” “We caught a bot! I knew there were bots stirring up gender conflicts on weibo.” “Turns out, you really can’t get too invested in weibo arguments. You don’t even know if the other side is a person or not.”
“We’ll all get old some day.”
“Old people can’t take kids, young people don’t have time to take kids, nannies are too expensive and unsafe. Conclusion: don’t have kids.”
An askreddit question, “What do you feel about the slur “commie”?”
The top-voted reply is, “I just want to ask: have you ever starved?
Has your whole family ever starved?
Has your whole county ever starved?
It’s simple. From the seventies and eighties onward, my uncle, my aunt, all of them were malnutritioned, had terrible teeth, were super short.
My grandma split every penny into two, calculated what food they needed for the month, split it into rations. If her calculations were even a little wrong, or any kind of emergency came up, the whole family starved for the rest of the month.
Grandma always gave the best and most nutritious food to grandpa, and not the kids. Why? Because grandpa was the one who did all the physical labour. He was the source of income for the whole family. If he fell sick, the whole family would starve. Really starve. It wouldn’t be unusual to starve to death.
Some refugees from the south came by grandma’s house once, a little girl and her mother begging for food.
She gave the little girl a raw corn, and the little girl took it and bit into it right away. And then, with her dialectic accent, she said, “Oh, it’s raw.” My mom told me this story. This scenario probably happened fifty years ago. My mom told me about it twenty years ago. I still remember it.
Now, how many people starve like this?
The old people are all dead. The young people on the internet have never had to starve. Nobody remembers anymore.
Everyone remembers when we successfully sent Long March 5 into space, but a far greater achievement is making sure the majority of people in your country can eat.
It’s 2023. Sudan is at war again, and the cause is once again hunger. The world’s military instability meant that aid couldn’t come in. When people starve, of course they go into revolution.
At the same time, most people in China don’t go hungry. Eating meat isn’t a luxury for most people.
I was born in 1980. I haven’t really starved. But I didn’t eat well either. Most families just get by for dinner. Usually just some variety of porridge plus soy bean paste and pickles. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing else to eat.
For my whole primary school life, my ultimate dream was a five dollar birthday cake on my birthday. You can see it in TV shows set in the 80’s, sitting in an old, dusty counter for god knows how long. But I knew my family didn’t have money, so I never brought it up. But every time we went shopping, I’d look at it, and feel happy.
Making sure most people can eat is the greatest accomplishment as a government. Ending poverty is the greatest accomplishment.
Going to space is just a nice bonus. Making sure people can eat is saving lives.
In a country of over a billion people, making sure most people can eat is a great accomplishment.
Making sure people can walk the streets and night and not worry about being shot is a great accomplishment.
Making sure kids in school won’t be seduced into taking drugs by bad students is a great accomplishment.
Making sure sick people don’t have to wait several days and can get a CT scan or X-ray at any time is a great accomplishment.
Don’t take any of this for granted.
This is stuff people didn’t even dare to think about back in the day, and now everyone takes it for granted.
I’m not a commie. That’s not a real word for the past several decades. I’m just a normal citizen.
I’ve watched America pick wars all over the world. I don’t know where they’ve brought this kind of safety and security when they were done fighting.
I just want to live a good life. If America screwed us up, split us apart, would we have this life? After everything falls apart, it’s not going to stick together again. Just look at every other country’s history.
If you see a starving person on the internet, you think it’s a big deal. You have a lot of sympathy. But when several hundred million people can’t eat. When every family and every person is in this situation, what’s going to happen?
I know when you see the news talking about ending poverty, you don’t feel much about it. It’s just another part of the daily propaganda routine.
When a rich person helps a poor person eat, we say he’s a good person.
When a rich person helps a group of people to eat, we call him a philanthropist.
A lot of people say Bill Gates is a philanthropist. But even if Bill Gates donated everything he owned, how many people can he help? His power and resources is nothing comapred to an entire government.
I believe, and I tell everyone this, China ending poverty has satisfied the daily needs of over a billion people. This is the greatest accomplishment in human history. Period.”
Comments say, “But isn’t this what a government is supposed to do?”
“How is commie even a slur? I’m proud to be red through and through.”
“What’s great is the people.”
“This is just due to technological advancements all over the world. It’s not the work of any particular person. So long as you’ve got half a brain cell, you could make sure your citizens don’t starve.”
An education blogger posts a tiktok video of a baby crying, saying, “Are kids these days all like this? Rebellious from birth, can’t beat them, can’t scold them, gets angry over fucking nothing, got a temper like I’ve never seen.”
Comments say, “Let him cry. He’ll stop when he’s tired.”
“I love videos like this—makes me happy.”
“Only very few kids are like this.”
A tiktok video of a guy recounting the story of his life, “I’m 28 years old this year. My whole life is like an fleeing from calamity, from poverty, domestic abuse, and school bullying. This is my story, and I hope you never have to experience what I experienced.
My mom found out she was accidentally pregnant at 20 years old. She’d never been to school. She didn’t know what pregnancy was. She just thought she ate too much. She hadn’t married yet, so she wanted to get an abortion. But on the way to the clinic, she had diarrhoea, and wondered to herself if she really had just ate too much. She went for an abortion a second time, and had diarrhoea on the way a second time, and that’s why she decided to have me. I asked her before why she gave birth to me, and she said that she didn’t make the decision, I made the decision.
After I was born, my parents got married. They were dirt poor. Their marital house was converted from a pig sty. In order to make a livelihood, they gave me to my disabled grandpa and my grandma with heart disease when I was two years old. They went to work on the piers of Guangzhou. They left for eight years. I became an abandoned child in the poorest mountain regions of Sichuan. Some people have happy childhoods. My childhood is survival.
I only learned to talk at four years old, and I had a stammer. So I had a very introverted personality. Some kids are loveable. I was punchable. I have a scar on my forehead. It was from an air rifle by a relative. He was aiming for my left eye. I got lucky that I wasn’t blinded, or else I’d have to talk like this (winks). My nose was broken by my aunt once. To this day, I can’t pick my nose without causing a nosebleed. Another relative forced liquor down my throat when I was five. Now I throw up whenever I smell baijiu. Sometimes people try to toast me, saying their feelings are in their cup. I’m like, “No, only my childhood trauma is in that cup.”
Rural villages aren’t paradises on the edge of society, they’re the frontiers of law. Every time I hear someone talking about reconciliation with your family, my first reaction is in court or in arbitration?
My grandma knew she couldn’t protect me, so she always emphasised how it was important I study hard and escape from here. I went to the local public school, two hilltops away. There was only one teacher at school, who could only speak the Sichuan dialect. Yes, even for the English subject too. If we didn’t study hard, she would hit our hands, but she never hit us in the legs. She said that our legs are for walking away from this place.
In 2003, the public school shut down due to SARS. We lost our schooling too. My mother begged a relative in the cities to let me stay at his house for schooling. The very first day I started going to school in the city, I was beat up by my classmate. He told me to stay away, that I smelled like mud. I thought to myself, “Yeah, no shit, I was just shaped by Nvwa.” I asked my relative for help. That relatives asked me, “Why do they pick on you and not anyone else? You should think about what you did to cause this.”
Because I didn’t have parents around, my classmates called me an orphan. They would whip me with their jump rope. I’d go hide in the bathroom, and I was too scared to cry, because I realised I’d accidentally ran into the female bathroom.
My mother had to pay the relative living expenses every month. My relative tried to make as much profit from it as he could. He never even bought stationery for me. I had to go steal. One time, I was stealing a pen, and I was caught by the store owner, and he beat me with a mop handle. I never dared to get sick. I got a fever once, and my relative wouldn’t take me to the doctor, and he asked me the next day if I was done burning up. I wanted to tell him no, I’m a beaker, I’m made for burning up.
My parents knew all this. When I was 10 years old, they decided to take me to Suzhou. That was the first time I met my parents. I called them uncle and aunty at first. I lived on a construction site with them for four years. This is the only four years I’ve ever spent with my parents in my life so far. We lived in an employee shack with a cracked wall. It leaked all the time. I had frostbite all over my ears and hands every winter.
Every day, at 5:30 am, I needed to get up and make breakfast, and then walk half an hour to school. Every time I felt like life wasn’t worth living, I’d recite to myself “To Masheng in Dongyang” (Ancient Chinese poetry about a cold winter). Suzhou is very discriminatory towards out of staters, everyone called me “foreigner”. I didn’t know how to speak mandarin at 10 years old, and everyone made fun of me. In order to fit in, I’d recite books out loud on my way to school, and I’d slap myself every time I screwed up.
In middle school in Suzhou, you were guaranteed entry to high school if your grades were high enough. I was the second highest scoring student in school. But because I was from out of state, my guaranteed entry spot was taken away.
Back in the day, there was no program for taking high school entrance exams out of state, so I had to return to Chongqing to take my exams. I had four months to prepare, and the curriculum was completely different between the two states. I studied day and night. Our dormitories were lights off at 11pm. I’d go to the corridors to keep studying. Once, I was caught by the dorm manager, and she confiscated my little lamp. I burst into tears and I asked, “Isn’t this a school? Why aren’t I allowed to study?” The next day, my teacher scolded me on the school announcement system. After she was done, she gave me another little lamp. She said she’d make an exception for me.
I got 728 out of 750 for my exams. It was the top grade for my area. I had the choice between the very best high school, or a not as good highschool, but I can get a scholarship, and they’ll reimburse my living expenses. If I got into the top 2 universities, they’ll give me another bonus on top. Because I wanted to make my parents a little more comfortable, I picked the latter option.
So from 15 years old, I was financially independent. Others are going to school, I am going to work. If you’re going to work, you need to be prepared for PUA. If my grades slip even a little, they’ll call a meeting over me, and my teachers would warn me that if I don’t work hard today, I’ll be done for tomorrow. I couldn’t handle that level of stress. When the college entrance exams rolled around, I ended up in the nurse’s room half way through my Chinese exam, without even completing my essay. In the middle of the exams, I even thought to myself maybe I should just jump off a building.
Obviously, I didn’t jump, and I pushed myself through the exams, but even today, I still have nightmares about this. I got into an Ivy League in Shanghai, and at 18 years old, I rode on the train for two days to go to Shanghai. My life began to change at this point.
I double majored in Humanities and STEM for my Bachelor’s. I worked while I studied. I got a full scholarship every year. I’ve worked all kinds of jobs. I wouldn’t give up my virginity, but I gave up on my pride and dignity a long time ago. In the middle of all this, my family house collapsed, my mom needed surgery, all of that was paid for with the money I earned at school.
A lot of my friends hate being ordinary. They want to change the world, be famous and rich. I never wanted these things. I’ve fought with my life for the same opportunity for education and the same opportunity to work as every one else, to be ordinary. Hope was the only thing driving me forward.
I used to listen to the radio while living on the construction site, and that’s when I thought to myself that I’d like to work in media. When I was 19, I was offered work with the Shanghai TV Network. Today, I am still working in media.
When I was little, I looked up to Shanghai. I wanted to live there. When I was 25, I graduated from my Master’s Degree, and got my Shanghai hukou. I wanted to go into music when I was little too, but I never had the money and opportunity, so I’d just make shit up. But after graduating, my first job was a music producer. The music I made was played on Happy Base Camp (most popular Chinese reality TV show), the hosts recommended it. I’m currently employed by China’s biggest music platform. I had a stammer when I was little and I was bullied for it. Now, I study standup comedy and changed myself. I wanted my parents to get out of the dangerous steel industry. Last year, I put together a substantial retirement fund for them. They are free now.
Regrettably, both my grandparents passed away. I don’t have many family left who love me.
28 years old is the turning point of my life. Up until now, I have been fleeing. I was fleeing from the calamity that my birth has brought me. I used to think I was the problem. It was my fault for getting picked on, it’s my fault for failing exams. But I keep forgetting that I got the worst hand in the deck.
Now, I’m financially free and I’m married. Looking back, it feels like sailing through hundreds of mountains in a light raft. My 28 years old feels more like an 18 years old, I can finally start living for myself from now on.
Of course, my past still influences me. For example, every time I go back to Chongqing, I feel physical pain. For example, I have very severe dependent personality disorder. But most importantly, I have more courage. No matter what kind of darkness lies in my future, compared to my past, it’s nothing.
This is my story. If you’ve been through this too, I hope you can pull through too. Let us meet up where there is light.”
Comments say, “The two biggest lies of society: kindly old people, honest farmer.”
“Amazing. You won the game with the worst hand possible.”
“Your parents must’ve saved the world in a past life or something. They shat out a baby, let him grow up in the wild, get through every obstacle by himself, never spend a single thought on him, and now they have a great human being as their son who pays for their retirement.”
“Am I the only person wondering how the hell he got married, when he’s clearly gay?”