Xi was “elected”, for a third time, as the president of China on March 10th, a date, as many people noticed, also marked the 111th anniversary of Yuan Shikai becoming the first president of the Republic of China. Yuan Shikai was a Chinese military and government official who rose to power during the late Qing dynasty and eventually ended the Qing dynasty rule of China in 1912. Through negotiation with Kuo Mintang, he became the first president of the Republic of China. Later on, Yuan Shikai tried to be an emperor and was forced to abandon this position by a nationwide revolt, and he died shortly after that.
On the same day Xi was “elected”, Beijing’s weather made waves on Wechat:
Superstitious officials consider bad weather bad luck.
Xinhua News agent reported on Xi being “elected” as the president of the country and chairman of the military commission:
Just below the headline is one advertisement for immigrating out of China:
Golden period for immigrating out, fast, convenient, many projects, short term. Low requirement on the capital. One person applies for the whole family.
Meanwhile, the old prime minister, Li Keqiang was giving his farewell speech to his employees, “people are doing, heaven is watching, the firmament has eyes.” Only people who feel that they have been wronged and their work was not appreciated would say this. And soon, Weibo censored this video.
The new Prime Minister “elected” is Li Qiang, whose rise to power is entirely due to his loyalty to Xi Jinping. Reuters has run reports that he insisted on ending Zero-COVID in November and December, despite Xi unease. The report was meant to paint Li Qiang as an independent Prime Minister with capabilities. Most Chinese think it is just government propaganda to the West, it happens with every new Prime Minister, they say.
You might have heard that a little movie about a Chinese-American matriarch and her family just won 7 awards at the Oscars.
This must be very exciting news for China, you wonder. No, not at all.
In the past, when the Oscars ended, many Wechat public accounts would have numerous articles describing each Category winner. But not this year.
I was surprised to find zero article about EEAAO in the morning, when looking for any report about the Oscars. Only in the afternoon, I saw one article, titled “What did she say”. Michelle’s speech was introduced to the Chinese audience along with many past Oscar-winning actresses.
It seems that all the public account editors got some directions from the top to avoid the topic.
Soon, someone noticed that Weibo deliberately suppressed the ranking of Oscars-related news:
Let me help meld your Oscars & NPC timelines with a window into deeply misleading Weibo trending topics.
At this moment, many of the top 30 topics are dominated by NPC. #1 is “China’s people are the masters of their own fate”
One about Michelle Yeoh winning is #21, but if you look at the data on these, the Michelle Yeoh hashtag is far more popular right now than anything NPC-related. Weibo’s own rating on hashtags popularity gives a 10 to the Oscars topic and a 5 to the NPC. 10x more people are posting about the Oscars.
How do normal Chinese view the movie EEAAO? From my observations, most people inside China have not seen it since it was never shown in theatres in China. But of course, many have seen the pirated version. Most middle-aged Chinese do not like it, finding it boring or too noisy. This includes Chinese who have lived in the USA for many years. But many of them commented that their children absolutely love it.
I first heard of this movie from Sean Carroll’s podcast: “193 | Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”, it raised my interest in the movie and I watched it.
BTW, if you have signed the petition to cancel Donnie Yen’s appearance in the Oscar ceremony, I am happy to inform you that your effort failed.
But, failure is the mother of success. So, congratulations on trying!
The website of CCTV (the mouthpiece of CCP propaganda) released a short video praising the glory of making money through labour work. In it, a middle-aged man was pulling a heavy cart on the street. The comments on the screen asked: why he was not driving a Porsche to deliver the goods? In the video, a white Porsche was cruising by.
CCTV.com realized the mistake: presenting the gap between the rich and poor so huge on the video. So they edited the Porsche out.
But the car behind the white Porsche is a Porsche Cayenne, equally expensive. The effort to hide the gap was laughed at by netizens.
Perhaps more telling of where China is going is this observation by Chinese netizens on March 16th:
Today, the official media suddenly came together to criticize “Kong Yiji literature” (孔乙己文学”), saying that young people are unable to put down their self-esteem to find a job because of their high education, just like the character Kong Yiji in Lu Xun’s book. The topic has now reached first place on Weibo hot search.
However, the comment section is again again again again again again again the opposite of their expectation. Instead of blaming young people for not being able to put down their self-esteem to find a job, “the government should first implement the labor law to protect workers’ rights”, many young people commented on the Weibo official account of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League.
(Kong Yiji is a fictitious character created by Lu Xun, known by most young people because the novel was used in secondary education textbooks. (Not sure if Xi Jinping has read it though). Kong Yiji was a scholar educated in the system run by the Qing dynasty. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Kong could not find a job and became very poor, but he always insisted that he was educated and tried his best to fight back the humiliation he suffered because of his poverty.)
Looks like China’s economy is facing a surplus of highly educated young people, and a shortage of low-skill but demanding labour work.
There is another piece of news about a young man, Hu Chenfeng, who just got his social media accounts in China eliminated. The young man documented how much grocery one can buy with 100 RMB using videos and published them on his social media account. For example, you can see this one on Youtube. He talked to a 78-year-old woman and found out that she had only 107 RMB total income a month, as social insurance for old people in the countryside. He took her to buy rice and flour and then bought meat and eggs for her out of his money. He said the money came from his followers on social media. For now, he is not allowed to post this kind of videos inside China anymore.
If this newsletter started a few years earlier, there would be many episodes dedicated to this con artist. But, his glory is the past, although he still had a large influence among thousands of people and managed to take away a billion dollars from them. Guo has a long shady history with CCP and then he fled China and became an anti-CCP “hero”, when his relationship with CCP soured. We introduced a detailed report by the New Yorker on his background as a spy and his work with Steve Bannon in Newsletter 99.
Today, it is reported that he was arrested by the FBI for financial fraud: Chinese tycoon and Bannon ally Guo Wengui charged with $1bn fraud