The policy announcement was incredibly sudden, and its implementation was swift – the Health Code QR code was lifted, and checks for green codes in public places ceased. Browsing the Chinese-language version of The New York Times, the entire front page was dominated by discussions about China’s reopening.
Don’t know politics, don’t make comments, record this “carnival” on the internet.
The leadership team insisted for two days that Shanghai wouldn’t be locked down, that Shanghai was important. But in the end, facing the reality or to preserve their own prestige, they came up with a strategy of closing across the Huangpu River first for a period of time, and then locking down this side of the river.
Growing up, I experienced the SARS epidemic and have very little memory of it. After seeing related materials, it ended because its incubation period was short and there wasn’t a nationwide spread yet. I remember being in primary school back then, with classes ending early every day, and the smell of disinfectant always lingering in the air.
Recent two trading days have seen a significant downturn in the stock market, exposing newcomers to the risks of the market. China is about to enter an aging demographic phase, and birth rates are dismal, with the decline exceeding the estimates of relevant experts, hindering industries that obstruct declining birth rates; the Party will take decisive action.
Those of us born in the 1990s didn’t have as many interest classes or tutoring sessions; after school, we would run wild playing. This was first due to the limitations of our families’ conditions and second because tutoring centers hadn’t yet established a brand effect, convincing parents to trust them. Twenty years have passed in a flash, and since 2019, the capitalization of K12 education has seen the rise of online tutoring companies like猿辅导 (Yuancu Tu), bolstered by capital, which have created various high-end tutoring centers by concentrating excellent resources. Despite exorbitant fees, parental enthusiasm remains unstoppable.
Let’s start with some tangential points, the differences between Chinese-style socialism and capitalism. From the mouths of the older generation, we heard that to get rich, you first needed to build roads. China’s infrastructure construction – these things are all funded by the state, and in a capitalist society, they would be contracted out. In remote areas, there’s no profit motive, so companies wouldn’t willingly take on those projects. Talking too much is getting off-topic, and ordinary people might feel that trade wars don’t have much impact on their lives. However, China’s high-end manufacturing has always been relatively weak. The IT industry I work in – memory, hard drives, CPUs, graphics cards – the core configuration of assembling a computer comes from factories abroad. These components account for 50% of the total cost, and high-end manufacturing is undoubtedly essential. The collision between China and the United States is inevitable.