If you wanna practice Chinese especially you'd best avoid BJ and SH
Can confirm, learning this the hard way. Coming to a top Chinese university will mean that your local peers will be among the top students in the country, and thus they usually won't have the free time to connect with foreigners.
Here is the Qiushi article in which he says so (at the start of part II). The specific context in which he mentions a global reserve currency is when listing the attributes of a "financial powerhouse," the first of which being:
"a strong currency that is widely used in international trade, investment and foreign exchange markets, holding the status of a global reserve currency." (translated by DeepL, emphasis mine)
I don't think there is any mention in the Qiushi article about domestic consumption from what I can tell, though I guess this makes sense for an article focused on financial & monetary policy...? However part of me wonders whether strengthening the RMB could be a disguised way of boosting consumer spending without having to address the domestic issues behind the slump (and thus avoiding to address the neoliberal elephant in the room)? (my hope is that I'll be corrected on this assumption!)
I've just watched a few videos from them after seeing this comment, they're great! and in one of them (the video on the state of emergency) he even cites Parenti at the end. Thanks for commenting about their channel!
At least there are still some based people in the city; the other day I met an old Party member who upon learning that a PCF member (cringe I know, but there isn't anything better) shook my hand and said that France and China should unite to take down the US empire lol
Thankfully they don't do nazi crimes denialism, they often just repeat liberal arguments about central planning being bad due to lack of incentives and whatnot and this being why the USSR collapsed and that China's "state capitalism" is why it survived (that last part is kind of true I guess? but also so wrong at the same time!). I am learning some interesting things though, I'm still having an overall positive experience, but the liberalism does get annoying sometimes.
Unironically not too different to some classes I've had in China (okay that is an exaggeration but profs are libs here too—I guess it being an English language curriculum doesn't help)
Pootin my pants when the Ukrainians bomb the Dumbass