xiaohongshu

I’ve said for years that Chomsky is John Hurt’s character in Snowpiercer. So, not surprised at all.

The summary for China’s Central Economic Work Conference this week can be found on a substack here with quite professional translation.

(Note: I don’t know anything about this substack (linked from Naked Capitalism) but the reporting on the CEWC seems accurate compared to the Chinese readouts. I’m just happy not having to do the translation myself this time).

As the summary says:

The meeting noted that there are still many old problems and new challenges in China’s economic development. The impact of changes in the external environment is deepening, the contradiction of strong domestic supply and weak demand is prominent, and there are many risks and hidden dangers in key areas. Most of these are problems arising during development and transformation, and they can be solved through effort. The supporting conditions and the basic trend of China’s economy remaining positive in the long run have not changed. We must strengthen confidence, utilize our advantages, respond to challenges, and continuously consolidate and expand the trend of economic recovery and improvement.

So, first, please don’t tell again me that China has “no domestic consumption and oversupply problem”, which is a narrative perpetuated by many pro-China accounts on Twitter who don’t even live in China (a lot of them are overseas Chinese who live comfortably in New Zealand, Australia and the likes).

The Chinese government has fully acknowledged the adverse effects on the current state of its economy and has made it a priority to solve the problems.

The most important points are:

We must continue to implement a more proactive fiscal policy.
Maintain necessary fiscal deficit levels, total debt scale, and total expenditure, strengthen scientific fiscal management, optimize the structure of fiscal expenditure, and standardize tax incentives and fiscal subsidy policies.
Attach importance to solving local fiscal difficulties and firmly hold the bottom line of the “three guarantees” at the grassroots level. (Note: the three guarantees refer to guaranteeing basic livelihood, wage and services e.g. education, healthcare etc.)
Enforce strict financial and economic discipline, and insist that party and government organs get used to “tightening one’s belt 过紧日子”.
We must continue to implement a moderately loose monetary policy.
Take promoting stable economic growth and a reasonable recovery of prices as important considerations for monetary policy, flexibly and efficiently use various policy tools such as cutting the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) and interest rates to maintain sufficient liquidity, smooth the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and guide financial institutions to increase support for key areas such as expanding domestic demand, technological innovation, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.
Keep the RMB exchange rate basically stable at a reasonable and balanced level.

In other words, nothing really new here. From other reports, it looks like the 2026 goal is still to maintain a 5% GDP growth with 4% deficit (same as 2025), which in my opinion, is far too low to solve the low consumption problem caused by the massive wealth inequality.

Nothing about providing jobs guarantee (of which high youth unemployment is a real issue). It’s still mostly focusing on providing fiscal stimulus in necessary areas to help the private sector to create new jobs, rather than direct government intervention. The problem with this approach is that you need to have a lot of faith in the private sector to do the right thing, but that’s what the libs believe, I guess.

And obviously since the government is not inclined to run a high deficit, the already outsized debt burden in the private will continue to mount with little means to be alleviated.

Although the official policy will not be made until early next year, the CEWC pretty much sets the direction for what is to come, especially with the new Five-Year Plan about to commence.

Nothing obnoxious about it. Please tell me how Germany’s rebuilding of its military capability can stop itself from being a US vassal?

The US is not militarily invading Germany anytime soon, nor is Germany capable of reaching the US across the Atlantic anytime soon. The US exerts its influence over Germany by manipulating its ability to access energy, resources and global market through restricting trade and sanctions with other countries.

For example, the Ukraine war killed Nord Stream. Trump’s tariffs forced China to dump cheap EVs and solar panels on to the EU, which is killing the European green tech industries.

Germany’s militarization is driven by its neoliberal ideology (that its economy has to be driven by a trade surplus export strategy). And because Germany needs to run a trade surplus under such constraints, it will have no choice but to steal resources from the other countries, hence all the war rhetoric against Russia.

This was exactly what led to the rise of Nazi Germany back in the 1930s. The US simply demanded its war debt repayment from the Allied powers, which far exceeded their capacity to repay at the time, so they turned to the defeated Germany to squeeze even more out of them to service their debt. In response, Germany militarized and invaded Europe and Russia. The entire predicament was dictated by global capital. The same happens today.

You can search for “芳华解读” on Youtube and there should be some mirrors (I haven’t looked closely).

But notice that the videos are very “meta” and frequently made references to other media, as well as various substitute names that are easily recognized by the Chinese audience but would otherwise be incomprehensible for a foreign audience. This is due to the long-term Chinese internet censorship that prohibits certain sensitive words so you end up having an entire alternative lingo on the internet.

I still recommend watching the film though. It’s not overtly political or anything but you can feel the class divide that already existed back then. The director came from that background.

There is a recent Hindi film called 12th Fail. When I saw that I immediately thought: that’s literally Imperial Court Examination!

Not in a day, but more like over the span of 5-6 days. But the last 24 hours picked up the pace significantly so easily a few million views in a day.

he doubts it

Appreciate the mentions! But please note that I am not a “he”.

US forces stormed cargo ship travelling from China to Iran: Report Al Jazeera

United States forces raided a cargo ship travelling from China to Iran last month, according to the Wall Street Journal, in the latest reported instance of increasingly aggressive maritime tactics by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Unnamed officials told the newspaper that US military personnel boarded the ship several hundred miles from Sri Lanka, according to the report on Friday. It was the first time in several years US forces had intercepted cargo travelling from China to Iran, according to the newspaper.

The operation took place in November, weeks before US forces seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela earlier this week, citing sanctions violations. It was another action Washington has not taken in years.

US Indo-Pacific Command did not immediately confirm the report. An official told the newspaper that they seized material “potentially useful for Iran’s conventional weapons”. However, the official noted the seized items were dual-use, and could have both military and civilian applications.

Officials said the ship was allowed to proceed following the interdiction, which involved special operation forces.

Iran remains under heavy US sanctions. Neither Iran nor China immediately responded to the report, although Beijing, a key trading partner with Tehran, has regularly called the US sanctions illegal.

Earlier in the day, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun condemned the seizure of the oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, which was brought to a port in Texas on Friday.

The action came amid a wider military pressure campaign against Venezuela, which Caracas has charged is aimed at toppling the government of leader Nicolas Maduro.

Beijing “opposes unilateral illicit sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction that have no basis in international law or authorisation of the UN Security Council, and the abuse of sanctions”, Guo said.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday the Trump administration would not rule out future seizures of vessels near Venezuela.

Of course, both Iran and China are quiet about it.

It may seem as though China and Iran have ongoing strategic partnership if you only listen to the “anti-imperialist” alt media news, but anyone paying attention to their relations will notice that China (together with Russia) is pulling their strategic influence away from the Middle East since June 2025.

Trump’s B-2 stunt on the Iranian nuclear facilities killed this partnership. The real message being sent by Trump is that economic investment in the Middle East is far too tenuous for the Chinese investors.

Remember the Iran-China 25 year cooperation program signed back in 2021 that promised $400 billion investment in Iran? Four years on and not even 1% of the investment has reached Iran.

Not only that Chinese investors are pulling away, trade has also gone down, with Chinese customs statistics reporting -25% import and export with Iran in 2025.

On the international stage, China has been quietly abstaining on the UNSC resolution votes on issues pertaining to the Middle East since June 2025 (see my comment here).

Therefore, it is no surprise that the Chinese MFA is keeping quiet on the US seizure of their cargo, for China does not want to get dragged into a bottomless defense for what will turn out to be unprofitable investment in the Middle East.

But most significantly, Trump’s B-2 stunt had smashed the whole Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard scam about a Russia-Iran-China axis, which unfortunately many “anti-imperialists” on Twitter are still regurgitating about.

It has fully exposed that China’s foreign policy that emphasizes economic cooperation is far inferior to the USSR model of military protection when it comes to mitigating Western imperial advance.

Turns out that economic cooperation contracts can easily be thrown into the dustbin the moment a country is threatened with war. The recipient country is too busy preparing for war to honor whatever contracts they have signed, while the investing country sees too little profit to made if their all investment is sunk by the drop of the first bombs.

There is no Russia-Iran-China axis until they are serious about military alliance and reviving the USSR-style foreign policy. Don’t be fooled by the “alt media” telling you that China’s “strategy” is providing economic partnership to those countries. Trump’s B-2 stunt showed unequivocally the harsh reality that the fist speaks louder than the wallet. Anything else is cope.

You can have well paid workers with 500% increase in real wages without having to rely on running an export-led growth strategy. That’s my point.

It is neoliberal ideology that made countries do that.

They are not militarizing to fight the US lol.

Germany really has only two options left: keep being dependent on the US for energy, or invade Russia and steal their resources.

The green energy transition plan is being killed by China’s much superior renewable tech, and if Europe opens up to China, their domestic economy is going to be even deader than dead. This makes them even more reliant on the US consumer market.

So, they are militarizing to conquer Russia to gain independence from the US, since the economic cooperation route has been denied (the US bombing Nord Stream). The exact same shit that happened 90 years ago.

The British empire was a global creditor. The post-Bretton Woods US empire is a global debtor. Huge difference here.

The British empire needed gold. The US empire simply has to type in a number into the computers. Huge difference here.

The idea of a trillion dollar surplus is just insanity. It means, in a very simplistic sense, Chinese workers breaking their backs producing 1 trillion dollar of surplus values while getting no real goods and services in return. How is that not exploitation?

If your idea of socialism is workers from Global South countries working hard to send cheap goods and services for wealthy Global North countries to enjoy while receiving no real benefits in return but a mere number in bank account, which in turn perpetuate neo-colonial exploitation and surplus value extraction, then so be it, but understand that this is just Western left wing crypto-imperialism.

Before 1971, during the gold standard and Bretton Woods era, most countries had fixed exchange rate which means that those that ran trade surpluses actually accumulated something valuable (gold, dollar pegged to gold).

After 1971, the US began to export its manufacturing capacity to the Global South, and the latter countries that since ran trade surpluses receive a number in their bank accounts in return (a number that the Fed could make up by simply typing in keystrokes). Huge difference here.

That’s how super-imperialism works. The wealthy Global North countries exploit the cheap labor and resources, and extract the surplus values from the Global South simply through financial means, through the power of their currency exchange rate.

Anyone who supports this really is a crypto-imperialist who wants the Global South working class to work even harder but receive no real benefits in return in the form of imported goods and services.

Ironically, Trump is right. China should give Trump exactly what he wants. Let the American workers be the world sweatshop workers for once lmao. Let the Global South countries enjoy the fruits of American labor for once, for they have extracted from the rest of the world for far too long.

Hmm… if we look at the Lost Decade Japan, the trajectory was similar. The Japanese government saved the older employees at the expense of youth employment, and the end result was that Japan had to endure zero growth for 30 years until very recently, when enough of the elderly have died to allow the wealth to trickle downward again. So it’s always possible to keep the stagnation going for decades. I don’t believe that a sufficiently developed society can easily “collapse” just like that.

I think it will be interesting to see how seriously the youth take up the revolutionary ideas? Is it just cosplay? A ritual to vent their anger into the internet? Or is there more substance behind it. I do agree that the Chinese kids are more class conscious than most other countries.

However, I honestly doubt it can grow into a tangible movement because unlike Western capitalist countries, there is no history of trade unions in China. The people don’t even know how to organize protest movements, don’t know how to strategize to make demands from their own government. Everything would have to start from scratch.

This is actually a big advantage for the Western left wing movements who have faced off capitalists for more than a century and have an actual history of trade union movements that succeeded in making real gains and progress in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I know you are joking but honestly come on, do Chinese people need a foreigner who knows nothing about China to teach them about their own history?

It is still very far from being a real movement. This was an internet sensation after all. The collective outburst of long repressed dissatisfaction that one could always feel its latent presence, but could not actually see it being manifested in the real world.

As I have pointed out in another comment, it is the youth making their demands: they want to have a slice of the cake, and a seat at the table. With the implicit threat that if this continues, maybe something like a Cultural Revolution is not impossible. But at the end of the day, it’s dissatisfaction of the current economic climate and losing out their upward social mobility, so this is their form of “protest”.

The government will have to respond, one way or another.

The genie is already out when they started to teach Marxism-Leninism in schools and the nation portrayed itself as a socialist country.

When the economy was trending upward in the last two decades, people don’t mind too much about which political ideology and economic system.

Now that the kids are increasingly realizing that they do not, in fact, live in the socialism as portrayed everywhere in the media, and that this is in fact, not the Marxism they were taught in school, suddenly they begin to question everything.

Even though the so-called Marxism-Leninism class is somewhat of a joke these days, and it’s more of a patriotism class, the ideas have been implanted into their minds. With the youth taking up the tangping (lying down) movement, they now have more time to read and study Mao and Marx and Lenin! Funny the things you do while being unemployed.

Having said that, I doubt there will be a re-run of the CR. It would take a lot more coalescence of the dissatisfaction to get there, and the government still has a lot of authority to crack down on the dissent. Furthermore, I don’t think the rest of the people would want something like that.

But the youth have already made their demands: they want to have a slice of the cake, and a seat at the table too. And that’s up to the government to decide on how to meet their demands.

This cannot possibly be astroturfed lol. The numbers we’re talking about are absolutely wild, and so far beyond that the Western intelligence could feasibly pull off. And don’t forget all of these platforms are under the watch of the Chinese government and censors. You don’t get to be the #1 trending video on the largest video streaming platform without the government knowing about it. So far, Hu Xijin (the guy who always toe the establishment line) from Global Times has said that the guy over-interpreted things, don’t take it too seriously etc.

In fact, I don’t even think the government expected such overwhelming response in favor of the Cultural Revolution. Otherwise they would have “disappeared” the videos much faster than they would have allowed them to stay up. There were tens of thousands of views even at 2am after midnight (on bilibili, you can see how many audience there are in the video). There were thousands and thousands of comments from the youth writing in the comment section of the videos about how difficult and bleak their lives are (sadly the videos have since been taken down). It is as organic as you can get. Then the next morning the plug was pulled.

West is turning fascist, China is turning Maoist lol.

Bonus material: Class mobility in China

It is crucial to understand why education is held with such utmost importance in East Asian culture.

In 103 BC, the Han Emperor Wu (aka the Martial Emperor of Han) made a decision that would change world history forever. The nomadic Xiongnu tribes in the north have always been a nuisance for the Central Plains governments. The periodic raids into the border towns have mostly been opportunistic raids, with the nomadic tribes taking advantage of their cavalry mobility. It wasn’t that the Central Plains armies were not capable of defeating the Xiongnu tribes, but it had always been a question of costs. Usually, you settle with some bribes, they go away for some years before coming back for more. It was the cost effective solution that held the balance for a long period.

Imagine Trump wanting to mobilize the entire US military to expel the Canadians into Russia Far East. It is not that the US is not capable of doing so, but the costs would be exceedingly high, all three of the political, economic and social costs.

But that’s the Han Emperor Wu wanted to achieve. He would launch the greatest Northern Expedition ever seen at the time, and with capable generals like Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, absolutely steamrolled the Xiongnu nomadic cavalry.

The third and final Northern Expedition would double the territory of the Han Dynasty, reaching as far as modern day Xinjiang! The Xiongnu nomads were forced migrate west and eventually their descendants became the Huns, who would wreak havoc in Europe centuries later.

But… at what cost? lol, you ask.

The cost is that to sustain the huge logistics necessary for the Han military for their long expeditions, the peasants were coerced to increase their output under excessively demanding conditions. The people would be squeezed to their death, fighting a war that most of them had never even heard of.

This was when the feudal lords (豪族, haozu) began to take center stage. Amidst hardship, coercion, forced conscription and levy from the government, the peasants took refuge under the protection of the feudal lords, who often held their own private army, land, farms, and production bases. The peasants voluntarily turned to slavery, because at least you are not left to fend for yourself against banditry, and the evil government officials who want to squeeze every grain out of you to embellish their results, or worse, dragging you to join the army.

The rise of the feudal lords would eventually evolve into the infamous Guanlong group by the 5th-7th century AD, an oligarchy holding very important positions in the imperial court and in regional provinces.

To fight back against the overarching influence of the oligarchs, the Imperial Court Examination began to take shape starting in the 5th century AD during the Northern Wei dynasty to seek talented and qualified officials from the lower classes (寒门), as a means of counter-balancing force against the oligarchs (门阀). The examination would become a fully mature institution by the 8th century under Wu Zetian during the Tang dynasty, the first and only female emperor in Chinese history.

The significance of the Imperial Court Examination would influence Chinese culture for the next 1500 years. This became the only chance that a person from the lower class can ascend to the higher class. A mechanism for upward class mobility.

As the saying goes, 一人得道，鸡犬升天 (one person gets promoted, even his chickens and dogs get to ascend to the heaven), meaning that if you won the examination prize and become a government official, it would be a ticket for your entire extended family, including those of your teachers, to ascend to a higher class. A much much higher class, with a lot more material benefits to reap.

As such, for many poor families, usually one kid (the eldest son) was tasked to study, while his brothers and sisters worked in the farm. This coincided with the invention of woodblock printing, and later paper, that drastically reduced the cost of accessing books for the lower classes. If the son became a local official, then their fate would be completely changed.

Even in the modern days, examination offers a one-way ticket for class mobility. It is no different for Japan and South Korea, having been influenced by Chinese culture. Getting a job at Samsung will literally change your life in South Korea, you simply have to compete with the rest of the nation to get there.

In China, that’s what gaokao is about, for getting into higher education. That’s why the kids study so hard. To be a civil servant, you also have to take the civil servant exam (考公), which is equally as competitive. Once you are part of the 60 million civil servants in China, you are “in the system” (在体制内), you have guaranteed employment, good salary, social benefits and welfare that are inaccessible to the rest of the working class.

Funnily enough, back in the 2000s and 2010s, becoming a civil servant was actually not very encouraged. It was seen as a boring career choice with not much upward trajectory. If you’re a civil servant, you could be tasked to some random town and that’s easily the next 20 years of your life. And because your supervisor isn’t that much older, you’re probably not going to get promoted any time soon. You won’t have much choice, but you will at least have guaranteed employment and benefits.

Back then, it wasn’t an attractive choice. However, since Covid, with the economic downturn, the number of people taking the civil servant examination has exploded. The total number of people taking the examination was 2.8 million people this year (!!), with an intake ratio of 74:1 (1.65%). That’s totally wild. People would rather have a stable employment and boring career than to risk it in the private sector. This tells you just how much the times have changed. Totally unthinkable even back in 2018-2019.

And because the civil service force is not going to expand much (mostly replacing the retiring employees), with the local governments experiencing increasing financial strains as their debt bubble becomes unsustainable, and with AI starting to replace all the desk jobs, the situation is only going to get worse. The people’s concerns are not unreasonable.

That’s the picture the youth is seeing in China today. What is the point of studying if the door for class mobility is being shut?

Final thoughts

If the first two parts of the videos were critiques of the wealthy elites that have infested the highest level of the CPC, which, believe it or not, are still tolerated by the party itself (there has to be an outlet for the people to channel their anger into), then the third part was what made it all the more controversial.

The author of the video series ended part 3 with: “Big brother (referring to Mao), your ideas were too forward for your time, which made you almost a god-like figure to us, this is what we [mere mortals] could never compare with… and only after years of experiencing the brutality of life, fighting for our last breaths, that we are only beginning to understand your insistence back in the days [for a Cultural Revolution].”

The ban hammer finally came. But it already reached a record of 37+ million collective views within a few days.

Whatever it is, it can never be taken back. The Gen Z kids have made their voices known. Perhaps the energy behind the so-called Gen Z protests happening around the world was real after all.

The government will have to respond. On the one hand, the government relies on the bourgeoisie to deliver the GDP numbers (very important numbers!), on the other, they have to take care of an increasingly dissenting youth who see a bleak future for themselves, which is made more dissonant by the fact that China is actually growing into a superpower.

I believe there will be more strict crackdown on revolutionary ideals to prevent a re-run of the Cultural Revolution. All of the leadership today, the liberal reformers, were victims of the Cultural Revolution. They are deathly afraid of it.

Finally, if you want to watch the film for yourself (which I recommend!), try to find the extended version. The absolutely breathtaking rendition of the Steppe Women Militia dance sequence was missing in the standard version, which you can watch here , starting at 1:40 mark!

You can also watch the original version here taken in 1976 (remastered).

xiaohongshu [none/use name]

@ xiaohongshu @hexbear.net

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xiaohongshu [none/use name]

And then i said: i never understood dialectics

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