If you remember, when young people showed up on the street to protest the dynamic zero COVID policy, it was shocking to people inside and outside China, because, since Xi came into power, strict control of the population via all-encompassing surveillance and social credit system made public displays of dissent very rare. Now, to people’s surprise, old people are on the street in large quantities.
Here is a report by Al Jazeera: Chinese retirees take to streets over plan to cut health benefits.
The protests are for now in only two cities. First Wuhan, the city where COVID started in late 2019. Then Dalian, a city in northern China. For the scene in Wuhan, you can see videos posted by a DWnews reporter in this Twitter thread. In one of the videos, people were singing propaganda songs made during the cultural revolution (probably equivalent of Despacito in terms of popularity for the retirees, who were teenagers during the cultural revolution).
In Dalian, people were singing the Internationale. The man in the video was saying that it was in front of the city government, and the police surrounded the protesters to stop them from going to the government buildings.
The protest was about the reallocation of medical insurance funds. One twitter user explained:
On the surface, the medical insurance fund reform is to activate the money lying idle in the individual accounts of ordinary people and distribute it to where it is needed more. It appeared to be reasonable, but there are lots of problems.
1) In the fund, there are two parts: one for ordinary people and one for government employees. The proportion of these two parts will not change. For example, if the government employees (6% of the population) take 50% of the fund, they still get it, no money will be moved to pay for other costs (explained later). It is only the 50% for the rest of the people that get to be moved to pay for other things.
2) The other things are related to the COVID policy: the large-scale PCR tests and the COVID vaccines and treatment. I am fine with the COVID treatment, but the PCR tests were decided by the government and all the money went to the testing industry.
So, now, the government wants to use the part for ordinary people to pay for these costs, while the government employees part will not be touched. Of course, people will protest. If their part ran out, they will have no insurance coverage for their medical care. There will be no solution as long as the government employees refuse to give up on their part of the fund.
The Chinese government is so worried about the medical insurance problem that the State Media has to give detailed reports on a crisis in the USA.
On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, United States. According to Wikipedia:
After the freight train burned for over two days, emergency crews conducted a controlled burn of several rail cars at the request of state officials, which released hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the air. As a result, residents within a 1-mile (1.6 km) radius were evacuated, and an emergency response from agencies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia was initiated.
A week later, this accident got a lot of attention on Chinese social media.
On Feb 16th, CCTV sent reporters to East Palestine, Ohio to report:
They are calling this derailment American’s Chernobyl. The foreign ministry scolded the American media for downplaying the accident.
The Twitter account of “Mission of China to the EU” was also tweeting:
Questions swirl around U.S. hazmat train derailment
“We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials that are going through the state of Ohio,” the Ohio governor said
“I’m concerned with the long-term health impact,” a local resident said.
But more telling tweet came from Hua Chunying, the spokesperson for the foreign ministry:
Now we know why the US gov fussed over a wandering balloon — to take people’s eyes off the chemical explosion #OhioChernobyl. Clearly for Washington the balloon is much more important than Americans’ safety and health.
This round of all-out fervent attention on the safety and well-being of Americans must have won the hearts and minds of the American people.
In our last newsletter, we mentioned that the media in UK and EU discovered and reported that the governor of Xinjiang was planning to visit UK and EU. The public reaction forced him to cancel the trip.
While the US-China relation is not going too well, media reported that Russian government has announced that they are expecting Xi’s visit to Moscow.
Does it mean that the alliance between China and the USA against Russia will end with Xi?
If this is true, again, I feel very sorry for young people living in China. Look at Russia: one year into the war, Putin is crafting the Russia he craves alt. If Xi wants to side with Russia, this will be what China looks like too.
Have you heard of He Jiankui? Well, let’s refresh our memory with Wikipedia:
He Jiankui became widely known in November 2018 after he had claimed that he had created the first human genetically edited babies, twin girls known by their pseudonyms, Lulu and Nana. The announcement in November 2018 of Lulu and Nana, who were born by mid-October 2018, was initially praised in the press as a major scientific advancement. But following scrutiny on how the experiment was executed, He received widespread condemnation, and on 29 November 2018, Chinese authorities suspended his research activities. On January 21, 2019, he was fired by SUSTech.
On 30 December 2019, the Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court sentenced He to three years’ imprisonment and a three-million-yuan fine. He Jiankui was released from prison in April 2022.
Now Mr. He is back in news, according to a journalist on Twitter:
He posted on the Chinese messaging app WeChat on Saturday that he was granted a Hong Kong visa under the Top Talent Pass Scheme on February 11.
The kind of “talent” Hong Kong wants is just impressive.