As we noted in our last newsletter, things looked quite grim even to foreign news media. But the Chinese government begged to disagree. In Davos this year, Chinese premier claimed that the GDP grew by 5.2%. Many Chinese on Twitter could not believe it because they have had so many friends in business complaining that they will not last long in 2024.
And sure enough, someone dug into the data and found out that the government was revising the data of 2022 down so that 2023 could have some growth. One Weibo someone had discovered one province had a 3.8% decline in GDP, but by fudging the numbers of 2022, they are reporting a 4.1% growth.
One economist that studies Chinese Economy believe the Chinese GDP indeed has fallen, for the first time.
Another dataset that is difficult to fudge but very telling is the foreign direct investment number:
Since the first day the Chinese Stock market opened in 2024, prices have been falling, with some very rare occurrences of rebound. The rebounds did not shore up confidence but triggered more people getting out of the market.
Hong Kong market fell so badly that the index of Heng Seng finally returned to the level of 1997, the year when Hong Kong was returned to CCP control. And people joke, now the stock market also returned.
Many rumours and jokes spread on social media. At some point, people believed that Xi got pancreas cancer, which is the worst cancer, and that he would not live longer than a year. The rumour was based on a recent press photo in which Xi seems to have lost some weight. Shortly there was some rebound of the stock price (rare!).
Xi made a public appearance recently in Tianjin, recalling fondly of the local baozi. Baozi, being Xi’s favourite food, is also one of Xi’s nicknames.
Most recent stock price decline had pushed Chinese social media users to leave comments under the official Weibo account of the US embassy, begging Americans to take over. When Weibo finally reacted and shut down the comment sections under the US embassy account, people turned to the Indian Embassy account. Some people also noticed that there seems to be a tradition. They found comments under the US embassy account in 2018 and Chinese stock fell.
One commentary explained:
Behind this economic downturn in China is a collapse of confidence. There are a variety of reasons, such as abolishing of the term limits (of Xi), the Zero policy of COVID-19, advance of state power and weakening of civil power, the war-wolf diplomacy, the economic decoupling of China and the United States, high-tech sanctions by the US, the debt explosion, the collapse of the population birth rate, and so on. They are mixed together to form extremely strong common predictions. To break this kind of consensus, the current policies are too timid. They just give people the opportunity to escape whenever there is a rebound.
The falling stock price is not just a matter of confidence. As the Chinese have a very high saving rate, for ordinary people, the stock market is one important way to keep their savings. The falling of stock prices directly affects many people’s retirement.
As Lunar New Year was approaching, many people noted that markets in China were very empty. That was in sharp contrast to earlier years, when markets were full of people buying for the New Year.
As usual, many (including me) are worried about Taiwan. Taiwan’s election went as expected. China feels more justified in taking over Taiwan with military action.
There were reports in January that the reason for the purge of the military leadership was that the missile system was totally unusable because fuel was replaced by a much cheaper liquid, water. This information led some to believe that the military invasion would be postponed.
But, now the US media is reporting that a war can come before 2027.
In February, Inter Miami is travelling to Asia for friendly matches with local teams. The first stop was Hong Kong on February 4th. The match was quickly sold out because Messi was coming to kick the ball. Many Chinese from the mainland paid six hundred US dollars for tickets to see Messi playing. But to everyone’s surprise, Messi did not play, at all, for the whole night. Towards the end of the match, the audience was shouting “refund!”.
Soon, a video was circulating that not only Messi did not play, but he also evaded the handshakes with the chief executive of Hong Kong by circulating behind him.
The chief executive of Hong Kong (whom Messi skilfully dodged) demanded the match organiser explains what happened, while other Hong Kong politicians just outright called on Messi to never return to Hong Kong.
“Black hand” is a Chinese phrase implying that there was a conspiracy plotted for political reasons. It is a very political charged words commonly used by state media.
Mainland China is also very pissed off and CNN reported “Chinese authorities cancel second Argentina soccer match after Messi backlash in Hong Kong”.
Chinese authorities have canceled two football matches featuring Argentina’s national team amid a growing backlash in the country against star player Lionel Messi.
Perhaps Messi finally felt the heat, on Feb 20th, Messi issued a video of apology on his Weibo account.
Meanwhile, many young Hong Kong people were laughing, they felt that Messi represented them: sad while working in Hong Kong and happy while vacationing in Japan (after Hong Kong, Inter Miami moved on to Japan to continue the friendly tour and Messi played there happily).
The Hugo Awards are given every year to the best science fiction or fantasy work. The way they are organised is distributed. Last year, in October 2023, the world science fiction convention happened in China, in Chengdu.
Among the winners, the best novel was “Nettle & Bone”, by T. Kingfisher.
R.F. Kuang’s novel Babel, which won the other award, the Nebula and won fiction book of the year at the British book awards, was a big contender for winning the Hugo too. But the book was disqualified. Also disqualified were Neil Gaiman and Xiran Jay Zhao (who wrote the excellent “Iron Widow” which happens to be a re-imagining of the rise of the Chinese empress Wu Zetian ), and Paul Weimer, a hobbyist sci-fi writer.
Kuang also wrote the Poppy War trilogy, an award-winning fantasy series inspired by modern Chinese history that imagines Mao Zedong as a teenage girl.
The voting data is public, so people started looking into the data and noticed… inconsistencies:
The data showed that the New York Times bestseller RF Kuang and the young adult author Xiran Jay Zhao were among authors who had received enough nominations to be on the ballot in their respective categories but were deemed “not eligible” by the award’s administrators, without further explanation.
The excluded authors expressed their frustrations:
Then on Valentine’s Day, emails leaked and a 20-page investigative report “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” was published.
A quick summary The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here
The short version is that eligible people and works were kept off the Hugo ballot, not because the Chinese government or the Chinese principals of the Chengdu Worldcon overtly demanded it, but because American and Canadian Hugo administrators made the censorship decisions themselves, often on grounds that were (to put it politely) misinformed.
that fraud? Really fucking badly done. It’s a farce, as well as a fraud.
An example of the “fucking badly done”:
Among the concerns […] raised about [Paul] Weimer’s writings were him having traveled to Tibet, him having a Twitter discussion with Jeannette Ng about Hong Kong along with mentioning Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square on that social media platform, expressing support for the Chengdu Worldcon while also sharing negatives about the Chinese government in a Patreon article, and writing a review of S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws where Jones said Weimer praises Huang for “tak[ing] one of the pillars of Chinese literature and reinvent[ing] it as a queer, feminist retelling of an important and nation-defining story.”
[…]
Weimer also confirmed that, despite the research done on him by the Hugo administrators, he has never visited Tibet. Instead, he had previously traveled to Nepal and Vietnam.
Of course,
However, in recent weeks posts like these from Chinese fans have been harder to find. According to a report by Ersatz Culture on File770 released on January 27 […], posts related to the Hugo Awards controversy in China began disappearing around this time.
And sadly
“They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.”
Finally, a scholar’s take on Tools for Thinking About Censorship.
Meanwhile, one winner said “Rabbit Test” unwins the Hugo - read Rabbit test (7067 Words ).
On Feb 14th, Kyle Bass, an Anti-CCP investment banker, claimed that
Angela Chao’s death at a private Texas ranch in Blanco, County is suspicious. ‼️ Chao entered her Tesla and backed into a pond on the ranch and passed away. Chao, almost certainly a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of China (she sat on the board of state-owned Bank of China… one of the five largest banks in China. She also sat as a board member of China Ship Building Corporation (which was sanctioned by the U.S. Government in 2020 for building ships and weapons for the Chinese Navy)).
Her husband, Jim Breyer has been a longtime VC investor in China. His joint venture firm, Beijing-based IDG Capital was just added (2/9/24) to the Pentagon’s list of ‘Chinese military companies’. Breyer’s firm is the first ever private equity firm to be so designated by The U.S. Defense Department (DOD). Breyer, in January of 2024, decided to ‘take a pause’ investing into China and Chinese tech companies for at least 18 months. Breyer’s VC firm gets designated a ‘Chinese Military’ company just a few days ago. Chao’s China Shipbuilding was sanctioned by the Biden administration. She decides to back her Tesla into a pond and dies?!
Angela Chao is not just any high-level Chinese-American with immense connection to CCP, she is the sister or Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell’s wife.
You think this year is the year of Dragon? Think again.
The Chinese do not like that translation anymore. They prefer Loong (龙) (the same pronunciation in Chinese). So, forget about Dragon, learn the new word and what it means in Wikipedia entry “Loong”.