This is the 100th issue of China.Table. This means we are still a very young product but slowly leaving the start-up phase behind us. We are proud to have gained notoriety in business and China circles so quickly, but we also rely on your help: Tell us how we can continue to improve! I look forward to receiving your e-mails at china@table.media.
In these 100 issues, the positioning of the EU and its members on China has been one of the dominant themes. We are now receiving mixed signals from Hungary. Voters are increasingly dissatisfied with Prime Minister Orbán’s China-friendly course. The latter must now find a compromise that doesn’t make him appear too China-savvy, as Amelie Richter reports. For Orbán, this would be a return to his roots. As an opposition politician, he used to rehearse the uprising against China.
Meanwhile, an uprising of a very different kind is emerging in China itself. The younger generation is fed up with the self-exploitation that parents and companies expect of them. No wonder. In the tumultuous upward phase of the past decades, diligence was practically synonymous with success. Meanwhile, the job market and opportunities for advancement are behaving much more unfairly and tenaciously. Young people no longer know what they are supposed to be working for, as Ning Wang reports.
The planned EU vaccination certificate is expected to make traveling within the European Union easier again as early as July 1. This week, the members of the European Parliament approved the corresponding draft legislation by a large majority. This means only the formal approval of the EU states is needed before the regulation can apply for twelve months. Just in time for the start of the holiday season.
The free Covid certificate is intended to provide information about currently taken tests and passed Covid infection using a QR code. Test certificates and vaccination documents are thus to be standardized throughout the EU. The certificate will state which vaccine the holder has received and whether it is one or two doses. Some EU countries have already reopened their borders to vaccinated persons from third countries, such as France and Greece.
Travelers from China, however, will most likely be left out in the cold in many EU countries – because the Chinese vaccines currently do not have the approval of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Under this approach, people who have been administered Sinovac or Sinopharm are not considered vaccinated in the EU. The Sinovac vaccine has emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) (China.Table reported), and the EMA has a review underway. It is considered quite possible that Sinovac will eventually get the approval. Sinopharm, however, is still far away from this.
The Green MEP and pharmacist Jutta Paulus stresses that safety comes first in the decision: “As long as there is no assessment by the EMA, I think it is a risk to exempt people who have been vaccinated with a vaccine that has not yet been approved from the quarantine or testing obligation.” She says the pandemic is far from over and the outbreak of new sources of infection must be prevented at all costs. The basis for decisions to exempt from quarantine or compulsory testing must always be the most up-to-date scientific evidence, Paul told China.Table. “That’s why it’s right that only those vaccines are considered by the certificate that have also been tested for safety and efficacy by the EMA as part of its rigorous review process.”
However: The EU certificate is neither a travel document nor a prerequisite. And, as so often within the European Union, there are exceptions. Because the EU requirements can be supplemented individually by the member states. In addition to vaccines with EMA approval, such as BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna, states can also individually recognize Sinopharm and Sinovac. This is currently already the case in Greece and Cyprus, for example. In Hungary, too, the recognition of vaccination with the Chinese vaccines is very likely – because the country’s population is also immunized with Sinopharm. And so a patchwork for travelers from China (and Hungarians vaccinated with Sinopharm) is created, which could possibly lead – should entry from the People’s Republic become possible – to Chinese tourists flying to Budapest rather than Paris.
In Germany, recognition of the Chinese vaccines is still in the stars. In response to a question from China.Table, the Federal Ministry of Health said there was a possibility that other vaccines would be recognized in addition to those approved by the EMA, for example, if they had WHO emergency approval. However, a decision would be made “in the light of the progress of scientific knowledge,” for example, on efficacy or side effects. The prerequisite is that a comparable proof of quality, efficacy, and safety is ensured for the vaccines with WHO emergency recommendation as for vaccines with EMA approval.
It is still unclear whether the EU certificate system can also be linked to digital certificates from third countries in the future. The Commission is trying to ensure the certificate’s compatibility with systems in countries outside the EU, the Brussels authority said. It also hopes the EU certificate could “serve as a model for other certificates” currently being developed in other parts of the world. The regulation allows the Commission to recognize by decision certificates issued to EU citizens and their family members by non-EU countries, provided these certificates “meet the quality standards and are compatible with the EU trust framework.” In the People’s Republic, there are currently no facilitations for vaccinated people – so the proof at the border is obsolete, and the mandatory quarantine remains.
It’s that time again. Millions of university graduates of the so-called Generation Z are being flushed into the job market in China’s cities. Although their degrees alone give them a very good chance of finding a job, not all of them will get the job they long for. More and more young Chinese see the pressure to perform at universities as unrealistic. Even the best grades no longer guarantee a smooth start to a career.
According to a survey by the Development Research Foundation and Zhaopin, one of China’s largest job platforms, more than 26 percent of 2020 graduates still haven’t found a job. They graduated when the country was only regaining its footing after months of quarantine. Businesses were still reluctant to hire job starters because of the uncertainty. The government wanted to help – but had few effective tools at its disposal: After massive “hiring programs” imposed on state-owned, as well as private companies, the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds out of work stood at 14 percent.
Zhang Chenggang, Director of the Research Center for New Employment Patterns at the Capital University of Economics, fears that such government intervention will worsen the situation. According to Zhang, the danger is that the policy gives graduates the illusion that higher degrees, such as a diploma, will provide them with better opportunities in the job market and especially in government institutions. Thus, the demand for government jobs has increased dramatically, as in an uncertain work environment, the prospect of becoming a permanent civil servant seemed very attractive to many. In 2019, nearly one million people had taken the civil service exam, qualifying them for a civil service job. This year, 1.57 million applicants took the exam.
The outlook is not encouraging this year either, despite relatively good control of the Covid pandemic in the country. For the first time, more than nine million young people are graduating from college, according to calculations by the Ministry of Education in Beijing. The outlook is no better for competition in the coming years, with more than ten million graduates already expected in 2022. While tough competition in the labor market has been the main reason why school drills have been part of everyday life since childhood, job prospects are now becoming less attractive for graduates.
Attitudes towards work have significantly changed, especially among Generation Z. This is because those born between 1995 and 2003 are becoming more selective. They are rebelling against what the economy demands of them. Their grievance is represented by the formula “996”: working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. Twelve-hour days – this has long since ceased to apply only to factory workers who assemble phones for Foxconn for the global market. China’s technology industry also considers it “glorious” for its employees to serve long working days. The 72-hour week has become the rule.
Particularly in the startups that provide services to the ecosystems of tech companies like Tencent, Alibaba, meal delivery company Meituan, social media app Bytedance, or e-commerce platforms like JD.com, 80-100 hour weeks tend to be the norm for employees. With the Covid pandemic and home office has come the 007 phenomena. The formula “0-0-7” stands for: Midnight to midnight 7 days a week. In other words, work around the clock.
Beijing’s focus on making the nation a technology leader by 2025 has led to more pressure being exerted on companies than ever before. Global competition in the technology sector is being played out on the backs of workers. This is the extension of the concept of China as the world’s workbench for the service and technology sectors.
A certain sense of jadedness is developing among Generation Z. They know that good grades are not the door opener for promising jobs. The booming tech industry, which is increasingly revealing the dark side of the logic of growth through its inhumane working hours, is losing its appeal not least because of the incidents of workers being exhausted to death but also because it is similarly exploitative and inhumane as factory work, which Generation Z wants to escape by studying.
Recently, discussions on social platforms have been on and off, showing a little insight into the minds of Gen Z. For a few weeks now, the term “lying flat” (躺平) has been used more and more often to protest against unfair conditions. This is no longer solely about working conditions. Instead, the focus is on a broad critique of society, in which it seems futile for many people to try hard in college, jobs and education because opportunities are unequally distributed anyway. A recent poll on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo, shows that 61 percent of the 241,000 participants welcome the trend.
“In today’s society, our every move is monitored, and our every action is criticized. Is there a more rebellious act than simply ‘lying flat’? Someone summed it up as ‘possibly the quietest and most helpless act of resistance in the history of human civilization,’” said Liao Zenghu, author and editor, in a post on the phenomenon.
“Lying flat” is a trend expressed in part by Generation Z’s preference to find a job in the country’s smaller cities rather than move to expensive metropolises and slave away on the hamster wheel. The “lying flat” movement is a reaction to “neijuan”(内卷). A term meant to express the tension of being constantly exposed to a highly competitive environment.
The party, meanwhile, is less than enthusiastic: The attitude of younger people makes it frown at how the country will rise to become a technology leader and economic power in the years ahead when the ambitions of the young no longer overlap too much with those of the party. It already senses the seeds of an existential crisis in the trend toward work-life balance and has had posts created on the Communist Youth League’s Weibo channel advocating “hard work.”
Beijing protested strongly when the pathogen spreading from Wuhan was initially called “the Chinese virus.” The name stigmatized the citizens of the People’s Republic. The World Health Organization (WHO) then named the pathogen Sars-CoV-2. In the meantime, it even declined the Greek alphabet to conceal the geographical origin of all mutations. Instead of British, Brazilian, South African or Indian variants, it now has to be politically correct: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. China is fine with that. It got its way: Nothing in the name of the virus any longer suggests a possible Chinese origin. For Beijing, this is a political issue.
Yet the People’s Republic is not so squeamish when it comes to infections that originate in other places. It calls Ebola the virus named after a river in Congo, or “African swine fever” for the deadly disease that infected and ravaged China’s pig herd in 2019. Just last Monday, the Global Times reported that the People’s Republic had defeated “African Swine Fever” (ASF) after two years, but the name ASF has survived in China, while the term “Chinese virus” disappeared globally under pressure from Beijing. The Congo, or Africa as a whole, simply does not have a lobby or as much influence as China’s government.
Internally, Beijing has no scruples about stigmatizing others. It likes to expose them to ridicule with animal names to rob them of dignity and self-respect. Mao drew fully from the dictionary of inhuman denunciations for his Cultural Revolution. He had his opponents demonized as “cattle devils and snake spirits” (牛鬼蛇神) or as “chameleons or vermin.” (变色龙，小爬虫). His Red Guards shouted as a battle cry, “Smash their dog heads” (砸烂狗头).
Has the cultural nation of China learned from this? Apparently not. Even President Xi Jinping is reaching into the dustbin of barbaric comparisons. In January 2013, two months after taking office as party leader, he ordered the Central Committee’s anti-corruption agency to “clean up” the party, military and state apparatus. He mobilized a hunt, bypassing the judiciary, for actual or perceived corrupt top officials (the so-called Tigers). At the same time, they were also to clean up among lower-ranking party and state officials (the flies). A year later, the third persecutee in the group was all corrupt officials and corporate executives who had absconded abroad as economic fugitives with fortunes (the foxes). Xi coined the catchphrases for his campaign, in which he also dumped his political opponents: beating tigers (打老虎), swatting flies (拍苍蝇), and hunting foxes (猎狐).
According to China’s newly published party history, Xi has hunted down 440 high-ranking comrades as tigers in the first five years of his rule, many of whom were sentenced to life in prison. Among them were 43 members of the 18th Party Congress alone, who once helped elect Xi as CP chief. According to the report, the flies caught so far even number in the millions.
In July 2014, the hunt for the “foxes” was added. Xinhua published a tally of the international manhunt. By June 2020, 7831 economic fugitives from dozens of countries had been extradited to China, including 2075 former party officials. Beijing would have recovered nearly €3 billion.
Unlike in the Covid case, there is no public discussion about the stigmatization of those prosecuted within China. The arbitrary anti-corruption campaign is accompanied by a large number of suicides by which the accused evade arrest. The China Daily once dismissed such suicides cynically. “They weigh lighter than a feather.”
Animal names such as wolf, lion or dragon, on the other hand, have positive connotations in political China. Since 2018, Beijing’s diplomats and foreign ministry spokespeople have taken pleasure in making headlines as “wolf warriors” when they aggressively defend China’s offensive foreign policy in tone and content. The name – first raised by bloggers – derives from the Chinese hit movie Wolf Warrior 2, in which a Rambo-like soldier hero frees Chinese hostages abroad. Since the term “wolf warrior” sparked global alienation, however, Beijing turned the tables and accused Western media of inventing the word.
It is undisputed that party leader Xi likes to compare China to the mighty lion or mystical dragon for the benefit of his own nation. In 2014, he wooed Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India: “The Chinese dragon and the Indian elephant” should join hands to establish a “fairer and more reasonable international order.”
Xi took the cake in his speech celebrating 50 years of diplomatic relations with France. In Paris in March 2014, he asserted that no one needs to fear the People’s Republic: “The lion China has already woken up, but it is a peaceful, friendly, and civilized lion.” Xi was alluding to a bon mot allegedly attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican, when asked for advice on how to deal with a China resisting foreign countries, is said to have once pointed to the world map and said, “There lies a sleeping lion. Let him sleep. If he wakes up, he may shake the world.” According to another version, Napoleon is said to have said “dragon.”
Foreign critics interpreted the image of the peaceful and civilized predator as a hidden warning. Beijing could change tunes if it didn’t get its way. Where on earth would there be such a thing as a friendly lion? Unless China saw itself as a domesticated zoo and circus lion. Or even as a paper tiger. But that’s certainly not what Xi, who loves animal imagery so much, meant.
Su Mang, the former Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar China, has triggered a shitstorm with a statement on television. She said that one had to spend at least ¥650 (the equivalent of €85) a day on food and that she could not live on less. Appalled by Su’s comment, many Internet users pointed out that most people in the country have less than ¥30 (€4) available for their meals every day.
This is the 100th issue of China.Table. This means we are still a very young product but slowly leaving the start-up phase behind us. We are proud to have gained notoriety in business and China circles so quickly, but we also rely on your help: Tell us how we can continue to improve! I look forward to receiving your e-mails at china@table.media.
In these 100 issues, the positioning of the EU and its members on China has been one of the dominant themes. We are now receiving mixed signals from Hungary. Voters are increasingly dissatisfied with Prime Minister Orbán’s China-friendly course. The latter must now find a compromise that doesn’t make him appear too China-savvy, as Amelie Richter reports. For Orbán, this would be a return to his roots. As an opposition politician, he used to rehearse the uprising against China.
Meanwhile, an uprising of a very different kind is emerging in China itself. The younger generation is fed up with the self-exploitation that parents and companies expect of them. No wonder. In the tumultuous upward phase of the past decades, diligence was practically synonymous with success. Meanwhile, the job market and opportunities for advancement are behaving much more unfairly and tenaciously. Young people no longer know what they are supposed to be working for, as Ning Wang reports.
The planned EU vaccination certificate is expected to make traveling within the European Union easier again as early as July 1. This week, the members of the European Parliament approved the corresponding draft legislation by a large majority. This means only the formal approval of the EU states is needed before the regulation can apply for twelve months. Just in time for the start of the holiday season.
The free Covid certificate is intended to provide information about currently taken tests and passed Covid infection using a QR code. Test certificates and vaccination documents are thus to be standardized throughout the EU. The certificate will state which vaccine the holder has received and whether it is one or two doses. Some EU countries have already reopened their borders to vaccinated persons from third countries, such as France and Greece.
Travelers from China, however, will most likely be left out in the cold in many EU countries – because the Chinese vaccines currently do not have the approval of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Under this approach, people who have been administered Sinovac or Sinopharm are not considered vaccinated in the EU. The Sinovac vaccine has emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) (China.Table reported), and the EMA has a review underway. It is considered quite possible that Sinovac will eventually get the approval. Sinopharm, however, is still far away from this.
The Green MEP and pharmacist Jutta Paulus stresses that safety comes first in the decision: “As long as there is no assessment by the EMA, I think it is a risk to exempt people who have been vaccinated with a vaccine that has not yet been approved from the quarantine or testing obligation.” She says the pandemic is far from over and the outbreak of new sources of infection must be prevented at all costs. The basis for decisions to exempt from quarantine or compulsory testing must always be the most up-to-date scientific evidence, Paul told China.Table. “That’s why it’s right that only those vaccines are considered by the certificate that have also been tested for safety and efficacy by the EMA as part of its rigorous review process.”
However: The EU certificate is neither a travel document nor a prerequisite. And, as so often within the European Union, there are exceptions. Because the EU requirements can be supplemented individually by the member states. In addition to vaccines with EMA approval, such as BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna, states can also individually recognize Sinopharm and Sinovac. This is currently already the case in Greece and Cyprus, for example. In Hungary, too, the recognition of vaccination with the Chinese vaccines is very likely – because the country’s population is also immunized with Sinopharm. And so a patchwork for travelers from China (and Hungarians vaccinated with Sinopharm) is created, which could possibly lead – should entry from the People’s Republic become possible – to Chinese tourists flying to Budapest rather than Paris.
In Germany, recognition of the Chinese vaccines is still in the stars. In response to a question from China.Table, the Federal Ministry of Health said there was a possibility that other vaccines would be recognized in addition to those approved by the EMA, for example, if they had WHO emergency approval. However, a decision would be made “in the light of the progress of scientific knowledge,” for example, on efficacy or side effects. The prerequisite is that a comparable proof of quality, efficacy, and safety is ensured for the vaccines with WHO emergency recommendation as for vaccines with EMA approval.
It is still unclear whether the EU certificate system can also be linked to digital certificates from third countries in the future. The Commission is trying to ensure the certificate’s compatibility with systems in countries outside the EU, the Brussels authority said. It also hopes the EU certificate could “serve as a model for other certificates” currently being developed in other parts of the world. The regulation allows the Commission to recognize by decision certificates issued to EU citizens and their family members by non-EU countries, provided these certificates “meet the quality standards and are compatible with the EU trust framework.” In the People’s Republic, there are currently no facilitations for vaccinated people – so the proof at the border is obsolete, and the mandatory quarantine remains.
It’s that time again. Millions of university graduates of the so-called Generation Z are being flushed into the job market in China’s cities. Although their degrees alone give them a very good chance of finding a job, not all of them will get the job they long for. More and more young Chinese see the pressure to perform at universities as unrealistic. Even the best grades no longer guarantee a smooth start to a career.
According to a survey by the Development Research Foundation and Zhaopin, one of China’s largest job platforms, more than 26 percent of 2020 graduates still haven’t found a job. They graduated when the country was only regaining its footing after months of quarantine. Businesses were still reluctant to hire job starters because of the uncertainty. The government wanted to help – but had few effective tools at its disposal: After massive “hiring programs” imposed on state-owned, as well as private companies, the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds out of work stood at 14 percent.
Zhang Chenggang, Director of the Research Center for New Employment Patterns at the Capital University of Economics, fears that such government intervention will worsen the situation. According to Zhang, the danger is that the policy gives graduates the illusion that higher degrees, such as a diploma, will provide them with better opportunities in the job market and especially in government institutions. Thus, the demand for government jobs has increased dramatically, as in an uncertain work environment, the prospect of becoming a permanent civil servant seemed very attractive to many. In 2019, nearly one million people had taken the civil service exam, qualifying them for a civil service job. This year, 1.57 million applicants took the exam.
The outlook is not encouraging this year either, despite relatively good control of the Covid pandemic in the country. For the first time, more than nine million young people are graduating from college, according to calculations by the Ministry of Education in Beijing. The outlook is no better for competition in the coming years, with more than ten million graduates already expected in 2022. While tough competition in the labor market has been the main reason why school drills have been part of everyday life since childhood, job prospects are now becoming less attractive for graduates.
Attitudes towards work have significantly changed, especially among Generation Z. This is because those born between 1995 and 2003 are becoming more selective. They are rebelling against what the economy demands of them. Their grievance is represented by the formula “996”: working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. Twelve-hour days – this has long since ceased to apply only to factory workers who assemble phones for Foxconn for the global market. China’s technology industry also considers it “glorious” for its employees to serve long working days. The 72-hour week has become the rule.
Particularly in the startups that provide services to the ecosystems of tech companies like Tencent, Alibaba, meal delivery company Meituan, social media app Bytedance, or e-commerce platforms like JD.com, 80-100 hour weeks tend to be the norm for employees. With the Covid pandemic and home office has come the 007 phenomena. The formula “0-0-7” stands for: Midnight to midnight 7 days a week. In other words, work around the clock.
Beijing’s focus on making the nation a technology leader by 2025 has led to more pressure being exerted on companies than ever before. Global competition in the technology sector is being played out on the backs of workers. This is the extension of the concept of China as the world’s workbench for the service and technology sectors.
A certain sense of jadedness is developing among Generation Z. They know that good grades are not the door opener for promising jobs. The booming tech industry, which is increasingly revealing the dark side of the logic of growth through its inhumane working hours, is losing its appeal not least because of the incidents of workers being exhausted to death but also because it is similarly exploitative and inhumane as factory work, which Generation Z wants to escape by studying.
Recently, discussions on social platforms have been on and off, showing a little insight into the minds of Gen Z. For a few weeks now, the term “lying flat” (躺平) has been used more and more often to protest against unfair conditions. This is no longer solely about working conditions. Instead, the focus is on a broad critique of society, in which it seems futile for many people to try hard in college, jobs and education because opportunities are unequally distributed anyway. A recent poll on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo, shows that 61 percent of the 241,000 participants welcome the trend.
“In today’s society, our every move is monitored, and our every action is criticized. Is there a more rebellious act than simply ‘lying flat’? Someone summed it up as ‘possibly the quietest and most helpless act of resistance in the history of human civilization,’” said Liao Zenghu, author and editor, in a post on the phenomenon.
“Lying flat” is a trend expressed in part by Generation Z’s preference to find a job in the country’s smaller cities rather than move to expensive metropolises and slave away on the hamster wheel. The “lying flat” movement is a reaction to “neijuan”(内卷). A term meant to express the tension of being constantly exposed to a highly competitive environment.
The party, meanwhile, is less than enthusiastic: The attitude of younger people makes it frown at how the country will rise to become a technology leader and economic power in the years ahead when the ambitions of the young no longer overlap too much with those of the party. It already senses the seeds of an existential crisis in the trend toward work-life balance and has had posts created on the Communist Youth League’s Weibo channel advocating “hard work.”
Beijing protested strongly when the pathogen spreading from Wuhan was initially called “the Chinese virus.” The name stigmatized the citizens of the People’s Republic. The World Health Organization (WHO) then named the pathogen Sars-CoV-2. In the meantime, it even declined the Greek alphabet to conceal the geographical origin of all mutations. Instead of British, Brazilian, South African or Indian variants, it now has to be politically correct: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. China is fine with that. It got its way: Nothing in the name of the virus any longer suggests a possible Chinese origin. For Beijing, this is a political issue.
Yet the People’s Republic is not so squeamish when it comes to infections that originate in other places. It calls Ebola the virus named after a river in Congo, or “African swine fever” for the deadly disease that infected and ravaged China’s pig herd in 2019. Just last Monday, the Global Times reported that the People’s Republic had defeated “African Swine Fever” (ASF) after two years, but the name ASF has survived in China, while the term “Chinese virus” disappeared globally under pressure from Beijing. The Congo, or Africa as a whole, simply does not have a lobby or as much influence as China’s government.
Internally, Beijing has no scruples about stigmatizing others. It likes to expose them to ridicule with animal names to rob them of dignity and self-respect. Mao drew fully from the dictionary of inhuman denunciations for his Cultural Revolution. He had his opponents demonized as “cattle devils and snake spirits” (牛鬼蛇神) or as “chameleons or vermin.” (变色龙，小爬虫). His Red Guards shouted as a battle cry, “Smash their dog heads” (砸烂狗头).
Has the cultural nation of China learned from this? Apparently not. Even President Xi Jinping is reaching into the dustbin of barbaric comparisons. In January 2013, two months after taking office as party leader, he ordered the Central Committee’s anti-corruption agency to “clean up” the party, military and state apparatus. He mobilized a hunt, bypassing the judiciary, for actual or perceived corrupt top officials (the so-called Tigers). At the same time, they were also to clean up among lower-ranking party and state officials (the flies). A year later, the third persecutee in the group was all corrupt officials and corporate executives who had absconded abroad as economic fugitives with fortunes (the foxes). Xi coined the catchphrases for his campaign, in which he also dumped his political opponents: beating tigers (打老虎), swatting flies (拍苍蝇), and hunting foxes (猎狐).
According to China’s newly published party history, Xi has hunted down 440 high-ranking comrades as tigers in the first five years of his rule, many of whom were sentenced to life in prison. Among them were 43 members of the 18th Party Congress alone, who once helped elect Xi as CP chief. According to the report, the flies caught so far even number in the millions.
In July 2014, the hunt for the “foxes” was added. Xinhua published a tally of the international manhunt. By June 2020, 7831 economic fugitives from dozens of countries had been extradited to China, including 2075 former party officials. Beijing would have recovered nearly €3 billion.
Unlike in the Covid case, there is no public discussion about the stigmatization of those prosecuted within China. The arbitrary anti-corruption campaign is accompanied by a large number of suicides by which the accused evade arrest. The China Daily once dismissed such suicides cynically. “They weigh lighter than a feather.”
Animal names such as wolf, lion or dragon, on the other hand, have positive connotations in political China. Since 2018, Beijing’s diplomats and foreign ministry spokespeople have taken pleasure in making headlines as “wolf warriors” when they aggressively defend China’s offensive foreign policy in tone and content. The name – first raised by bloggers – derives from the Chinese hit movie Wolf Warrior 2, in which a Rambo-like soldier hero frees Chinese hostages abroad. Since the term “wolf warrior” sparked global alienation, however, Beijing turned the tables and accused Western media of inventing the word.
It is undisputed that party leader Xi likes to compare China to the mighty lion or mystical dragon for the benefit of his own nation. In 2014, he wooed Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India: “The Chinese dragon and the Indian elephant” should join hands to establish a “fairer and more reasonable international order.”
Xi took the cake in his speech celebrating 50 years of diplomatic relations with France. In Paris in March 2014, he asserted that no one needs to fear the People’s Republic: “The lion China has already woken up, but it is a peaceful, friendly, and civilized lion.” Xi was alluding to a bon mot allegedly attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican, when asked for advice on how to deal with a China resisting foreign countries, is said to have once pointed to the world map and said, “There lies a sleeping lion. Let him sleep. If he wakes up, he may shake the world.” According to another version, Napoleon is said to have said “dragon.”
Foreign critics interpreted the image of the peaceful and civilized predator as a hidden warning. Beijing could change tunes if it didn’t get its way. Where on earth would there be such a thing as a friendly lion? Unless China saw itself as a domesticated zoo and circus lion. Or even as a paper tiger. But that’s certainly not what Xi, who loves animal imagery so much, meant.
Su Mang, the former Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar China, has triggered a shitstorm with a statement on television. She said that one had to spend at least ¥650 (the equivalent of €85) a day on food and that she could not live on less. Appalled by Su’s comment, many Internet users pointed out that most people in the country have less than ¥30 (€4) available for their meals every day.
