rising discontent across Chinese social media is not necessarily a reflection of the limits of that aforementioned censorship, but possibly a window into how the Party manages social malaise.
Over the past 18 months, the Shanghai Composite Index has risen 17.3 per cent. That is a respectable return, but it has not beaten the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq. The real gains have happened elsewhere, among the technology companies listed on ChiNext, Shanghai's STAR Market and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
This is perhaps one of the biggest efforts by Beijing to turn a fantastic vision of the future into reality, almost by force of will. They know the technology is not ready, but they think if they can turn it into this big spectacle that will crowd in investment and trigger this boom.
The China of 2036 will be vastly different than the China of 2026. Companies that used to manufacture luxury handbags are now becoming the brands themselves. Investors who used to copy American VCs are now running their own state-backed deeptech playbooks.
When he entered office, East Asia had 1.22 billion people living on less than $3 a day (in 2021 dollars) — more than half the world's total. By the time Xi Jinping became China's top leader, that number was one-sixth of what it had been: This is the biggest and fastest decrease in absolute poverty that the human race has ever seen.
According to China's official statistics, the Chinese economy shrank by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2022: China's growth is usually reported in year/year numbers, but quarter/quarter is how the U.S. and most countries do their reporting. So by the kind of measurement Americans are used to hearing about, China's economy officially contracted at an annualized rate of over -3% in the second quarter of 2022.
China's AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.
It thus went from the bottom to the top income classification within less than half-a-century. Moreover, it did so while bringing along more than 1 billion people (the average population of China during this forty-five years' journey).
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
