Today we present the next episodes of the Evergrande drama (Soar high, fall hard) and the Lithuania thriller (David versus Goliath). The story about the Baltic country resembled a comedy for a while but could escalate into a trade war saga. China wants to reject all EU goods at its border that contain even one component from Lithuania. This is the retaliation for Lithuania’s rapprochement with Taiwan. Now Slovakia has sent its own delegation to Taipei. Amelie Richter analyses whether the country could also fear repercussions. All in all, along with a possible ban on imports from Xinjiang by the US, an ominous sense of new trade conflicts is building up.
Meanwhile, the Evergrande drama may be nearing its final act – at least as far as the actual company is concerned. Rating agencies have already spoken the truth, which the real estate group still refuses to accept: Evergrande is bankrupt. What else should it be called when there is no money left for installment loans, bond interest, and contractor bills? So behind the scenes, preparations are underway for a restructuring. However, lasting economic policy aftermath could follow. China’s bloated real estate sector will have to shrink back to health under the supervision of the state. This will not be without side effects.
The trade dispute between Lithuania and China continues to escalate. The Baltic EU state remained locked in the customs system on Thursday, as the Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists confirmed. Shiploads are not being unloaded or processed by customs authorities. According to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, Beijing has now dragged other EU states into the dispute: China has advised companies to break all ties with Lithuania – or risk being excluded from the People’s Republic’s market.
Companies will no longer be allowed to sell their goods on the Chinese market if they “use parts and supplies from Lithuania”, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomėnas stated. Accordingly, anyone who has relations with Lithuania will also no longer be allowed to procure products in China.
This threat already has consequences, Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Adomėnas said: “We have seen some companies cancel contracts with Lithuanian suppliers.” He did not initially specify which companies were affected. At the same time, China had already curbed exports to Lithuania. Foodstuffs, raw materials, pharmaceuticals, furniture, and textiles, for example, were affected. Goods destined for Lithuania are now stuck at Chinese ports because they are not being loaded onto ships, trains, or planes.
Vidmantas Janulevičius, President of the Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists, confirmed that corporations with Lithuanian suppliers are being targeted. However, he did not give any further details about which sectors. Allegedly, there is pressure on a company from another EU country to get rid of Lithuanian suppliers. The government in Vilnius is already in contact with affected companies, offering them possible financial support, Reuters quoted an official as saying.
Brussels reportedly sought to clarify the situation. The EU delegation in Beijing was trying to resolve the situation “quickly”, EU Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis stressed on Thursday. “The EU will stand firm in defending its interests.” He had also raised the situation with Chinese EU Ambassador Zhang Ming during a business dialogue on Thursday, according to Dombrovskis.
This has not yet reached China apparently: An initial offer for talks by the Europeans was turned down, according to a report in the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The Chinese customs authority had rejected the European Union’s request to discuss the presumed trade ban. The authority claimed to have no time due to the Corona pandemic, SCMP reported, citing sources in Beijing and Brussels. Accordingly, Lithuania’s Deputy Foreign Minister Adomėnas said he was “not surprised” that Chinese authorities had declined to meet. He accused the Chinese side of hypocrisy: After all, the authorities were apparently not too busy to take action against Lithuanian companies.
The EU had already threatened to file a complaint with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Wednesday if the problem was not resolved. According to Trade Commissioner Dombrovskis, the EU delegation is currently gathering information on whether this was a unilateral trade embargo violating WTO rules.
The meeting between Slovakia’s Deputy Economy Minister Karol Galek and a trade delegation from Taipei for the first summit of the Taiwanese-Slovak Commission on Economic Cooperation also caused outrage in Beijing. Several cooperation agreements had been signed at the meeting, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday.
China accused Slovakia of violating a treaty signed in 2003. In the joint statement, Slovakia declared that it “will not establish official relations of any form or engage in official contacts of any form with Taiwan.” It would “only enter into private sector-led trade and economic relations with Taiwan.”
Beijing now stated that Galek’s trip “grossly violated the one-China principle“. The political trust between China and Slovakia had been seriously damaged as a result.
The tone was quite different at the Chinese EU Ambassador’s year-end meeting with representatives of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and the EU-China Business Association. “China welcomes EU companies’ active participation in the Chinese market, and hopes that they can share in China’s development opportunities, and prosper in the Chinese market,” EU Ambassador Zhang said. That sounded like he hadn’t heard anything about the feud over Lithuania. Or it only applies to compliant EU members.
There is a Chinese saying: Don’t touch a tiger’s butt (老虎屁股摸不得). The old master of Chinese satire Hua Junwu drew a tiger with a sign on its butt: “Taboo zone” and the caption: “The sole decider”. He wanted to mock officials who can’t be criticized. That was in 1979, and after the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which he was severely persecuted, Hua was once again allowed to draw after a ten-year ban. But his harmless caricature caused him new trouble. Ideologues accused him of an underhanded attack on Mao. Hua showed me how, in their eyes, the claw of the tiger looked like the character Mao in the name of the founder of the state. He had to completely redraw the claw.
Satire has always had a hard time in the stern People’s Republic. Today, its cartoonists resort to ever more complicated innuendos, freely following the motto of the aphorist Karl Kraus: “Satires that the censor understands are rightfully banned.”
The “Picture of the 100 Tigers” (百虎图) by the Cantonese cartoonist Kuang Biao recently gained my attention. He drew 128 well-fed predators on an open field for the New Year of the Tiger, which begins on February 1st, 2022. Their number resembles – pronounced in Chinese – the lucky saying: “I want to become rich”. Hidden in the picture, however, is a second message: his tigers seem very lazy. Some of them look like dozing seals, their eyes closed, unwilling to attract attention, simply ducking away.
The cartoon is here clearly alluding to a currently winged word in China, which has only been en vogue on the internet and in youth language for a few months. It is called “tangping”( 躺平) and means “lying flat”. According to China.Table’s language column, “It’s currently trending as a buzzword all over social media, as a kind of silent rebellion of the young generation.”
It could also be translated as “doing nothing.” Elsie Chen, New York Times’ Beijing correspondent, portrayed Luo Huazhong (骆华中), who had made it a buzzword with his post on the internet portal Baidu in April. Luo, now 31, was fed up being a factory worker in 2016 and quit. “I felt like a machine,” he told the reporter. First, he went on a bicycle tour, pedaling 2,100 kilometers to Tibet. Back in his hometown of Jiande in Zhejiang, he refused to look for a new job, practiced consumerism, just wanted to “chill” and lived off his meager savings. Luo sees himself as a modest “flat-lier” and feels like Diogenes in his barrel. He captioned a photo of himself, lying on his bed in a room with the curtains drawn, with the motto “Lying Flat Is Justice” (躺平即是正義). On China’s leading media, from Sina Weibo to Douban, he became a star overnight.
The drop-out feeling struck a chord with a generation that can no longer cope with the stress of school, exams, and constant performance. In 2019, their collective outcry on the internet against the “996 system” had paved the way. 996 stands for having to work from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, especially in China’s high-tech and IT industries. Young Chinese mocked themselves bitterly online, comparing themselves to “chives” that are constantly cut off because they can always grow back. Their new idol Luo disagrees: chives that lie flat are hard to cut (躺平的韭菜不好割).
His Tangping philosophy became synonymous with the search for a new lifestyle. Seven decades after the hippie generation shocked their parents in the US with their attitude of nonconformity, China is now gripped by a similar movement. Before that, the term Neijuan (内卷), (Involution) came up. It represents the feelings of many young Chinese who find themselves caught in a “rat race,” or senselessly running on a wheel like “in a hamster cage.” Young people, sociologists analyze, react to the “constantly intensifying competition from which there is no way out” with stress, burnout, and despair.
China’s CP reacted promptly to the first signs of passive social protest. Censors made Luo’s motto “Lying Flat Is Justice!” disappear online, deleted group chats, and banned booming online sales of T-shirts, teacups, and smartphone cases bearing the slogan. A month after Luo’s first posts, party media labeled “lying flat” as “shameless.”
The dreaded youth word even reached CP leader Xi Jinping, who keeps his ear to the ground when he suspects looming crises or subversive trends. In a speech on 17 August, to promote his program for common prosperity under socialism, he was “encouraging getting rich through hard work and innovation” and to “form an environment where everyone can participate in its development, avoiding ‘involution’, and ‘lying flat’.” (共同富裕要靠勤劳智慧来创造_….，避免 “内卷”、”躺平”).
Notwithstanding such interventions, online enthusiasm for flat-lying continued. In November, the China Daily devoted an entire newspaper page to the controversies surrounding the buzzword. It said, “the concept of ‘lying flat’ embodies rejection of a life and work culture where there is constant competition.” Finally, China’s National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center (国家语言资源监测与研究中心) has now confirmed that “tangping” is among the top ten most used online terms in 2021 (十大网络用语).
China’s party media are now trying to put a positive spin on “tangping”. It was, after all, just a desire “to take a nap in the perpetual struggle. Lying flat for a short time is to regain energy and start anew.” Nationalist Party newspaper Global Times had commented that tangping “recently struck a chord with many young Chinese, who are eager to take pause to breathe in this fast-paced and highly-competitive society. […] However, it is the same generation who vow, ‘We are working to revitalize the Chinese nation.’”
Even if China’s ideologues refuse to admit it, according to the motto “that what cannot be, must not be”: The party’s ideas struck a serious motivational problem among China’s youth.
Cranes at Poyang Lake in Nanchang (Jiangxi Province). Many migratory bird species from the north gather here in winter, appreciating the milder climate. The large birds also perform their dances here. Their sharp, trumpet-like cries echo across the lake.
Today we present the next episodes of the Evergrande drama (Soar high, fall hard) and the Lithuania thriller (David versus Goliath). The story about the Baltic country resembled a comedy for a while but could escalate into a trade war saga. China wants to reject all EU goods at its border that contain even one component from Lithuania. This is the retaliation for Lithuania’s rapprochement with Taiwan. Now Slovakia has sent its own delegation to Taipei. Amelie Richter analyses whether the country could also fear repercussions. All in all, along with a possible ban on imports from Xinjiang by the US, an ominous sense of new trade conflicts is building up.
Meanwhile, the Evergrande drama may be nearing its final act – at least as far as the actual company is concerned. Rating agencies have already spoken the truth, which the real estate group still refuses to accept: Evergrande is bankrupt. What else should it be called when there is no money left for installment loans, bond interest, and contractor bills? So behind the scenes, preparations are underway for a restructuring. However, lasting economic policy aftermath could follow. China’s bloated real estate sector will have to shrink back to health under the supervision of the state. This will not be without side effects.
The trade dispute between Lithuania and China continues to escalate. The Baltic EU state remained locked in the customs system on Thursday, as the Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists confirmed. Shiploads are not being unloaded or processed by customs authorities. According to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, Beijing has now dragged other EU states into the dispute: China has advised companies to break all ties with Lithuania – or risk being excluded from the People’s Republic’s market.
Companies will no longer be allowed to sell their goods on the Chinese market if they “use parts and supplies from Lithuania”, Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomėnas stated. Accordingly, anyone who has relations with Lithuania will also no longer be allowed to procure products in China.
This threat already has consequences, Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Adomėnas said: “We have seen some companies cancel contracts with Lithuanian suppliers.” He did not initially specify which companies were affected. At the same time, China had already curbed exports to Lithuania. Foodstuffs, raw materials, pharmaceuticals, furniture, and textiles, for example, were affected. Goods destined for Lithuania are now stuck at Chinese ports because they are not being loaded onto ships, trains, or planes.
Vidmantas Janulevičius, President of the Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists, confirmed that corporations with Lithuanian suppliers are being targeted. However, he did not give any further details about which sectors. Allegedly, there is pressure on a company from another EU country to get rid of Lithuanian suppliers. The government in Vilnius is already in contact with affected companies, offering them possible financial support, Reuters quoted an official as saying.
Brussels reportedly sought to clarify the situation. The EU delegation in Beijing was trying to resolve the situation “quickly”, EU Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis stressed on Thursday. “The EU will stand firm in defending its interests.” He had also raised the situation with Chinese EU Ambassador Zhang Ming during a business dialogue on Thursday, according to Dombrovskis.
This has not yet reached China apparently: An initial offer for talks by the Europeans was turned down, according to a report in the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The Chinese customs authority had rejected the European Union’s request to discuss the presumed trade ban. The authority claimed to have no time due to the Corona pandemic, SCMP reported, citing sources in Beijing and Brussels. Accordingly, Lithuania’s Deputy Foreign Minister Adomėnas said he was “not surprised” that Chinese authorities had declined to meet. He accused the Chinese side of hypocrisy: After all, the authorities were apparently not too busy to take action against Lithuanian companies.
The EU had already threatened to file a complaint with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Wednesday if the problem was not resolved. According to Trade Commissioner Dombrovskis, the EU delegation is currently gathering information on whether this was a unilateral trade embargo violating WTO rules.
The meeting between Slovakia’s Deputy Economy Minister Karol Galek and a trade delegation from Taipei for the first summit of the Taiwanese-Slovak Commission on Economic Cooperation also caused outrage in Beijing. Several cooperation agreements had been signed at the meeting, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday.
China accused Slovakia of violating a treaty signed in 2003. In the joint statement, Slovakia declared that it “will not establish official relations of any form or engage in official contacts of any form with Taiwan.” It would “only enter into private sector-led trade and economic relations with Taiwan.”
Beijing now stated that Galek’s trip “grossly violated the one-China principle“. The political trust between China and Slovakia had been seriously damaged as a result.
The tone was quite different at the Chinese EU Ambassador’s year-end meeting with representatives of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China and the EU-China Business Association. “China welcomes EU companies’ active participation in the Chinese market, and hopes that they can share in China’s development opportunities, and prosper in the Chinese market,” EU Ambassador Zhang said. That sounded like he hadn’t heard anything about the feud over Lithuania. Or it only applies to compliant EU members.
There is a Chinese saying: Don’t touch a tiger’s butt (老虎屁股摸不得). The old master of Chinese satire Hua Junwu drew a tiger with a sign on its butt: “Taboo zone” and the caption: “The sole decider”. He wanted to mock officials who can’t be criticized. That was in 1979, and after the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which he was severely persecuted, Hua was once again allowed to draw after a ten-year ban. But his harmless caricature caused him new trouble. Ideologues accused him of an underhanded attack on Mao. Hua showed me how, in their eyes, the claw of the tiger looked like the character Mao in the name of the founder of the state. He had to completely redraw the claw.
Satire has always had a hard time in the stern People’s Republic. Today, its cartoonists resort to ever more complicated innuendos, freely following the motto of the aphorist Karl Kraus: “Satires that the censor understands are rightfully banned.”
The “Picture of the 100 Tigers” (百虎图) by the Cantonese cartoonist Kuang Biao recently gained my attention. He drew 128 well-fed predators on an open field for the New Year of the Tiger, which begins on February 1st, 2022. Their number resembles – pronounced in Chinese – the lucky saying: “I want to become rich”. Hidden in the picture, however, is a second message: his tigers seem very lazy. Some of them look like dozing seals, their eyes closed, unwilling to attract attention, simply ducking away.
The cartoon is here clearly alluding to a currently winged word in China, which has only been en vogue on the internet and in youth language for a few months. It is called “tangping”( 躺平) and means “lying flat”. According to China.Table’s language column, “It’s currently trending as a buzzword all over social media, as a kind of silent rebellion of the young generation.”
It could also be translated as “doing nothing.” Elsie Chen, New York Times’ Beijing correspondent, portrayed Luo Huazhong (骆华中), who had made it a buzzword with his post on the internet portal Baidu in April. Luo, now 31, was fed up being a factory worker in 2016 and quit. “I felt like a machine,” he told the reporter. First, he went on a bicycle tour, pedaling 2,100 kilometers to Tibet. Back in his hometown of Jiande in Zhejiang, he refused to look for a new job, practiced consumerism, just wanted to “chill” and lived off his meager savings. Luo sees himself as a modest “flat-lier” and feels like Diogenes in his barrel. He captioned a photo of himself, lying on his bed in a room with the curtains drawn, with the motto “Lying Flat Is Justice” (躺平即是正義). On China’s leading media, from Sina Weibo to Douban, he became a star overnight.
The drop-out feeling struck a chord with a generation that can no longer cope with the stress of school, exams, and constant performance. In 2019, their collective outcry on the internet against the “996 system” had paved the way. 996 stands for having to work from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week, especially in China’s high-tech and IT industries. Young Chinese mocked themselves bitterly online, comparing themselves to “chives” that are constantly cut off because they can always grow back. Their new idol Luo disagrees: chives that lie flat are hard to cut (躺平的韭菜不好割).
His Tangping philosophy became synonymous with the search for a new lifestyle. Seven decades after the hippie generation shocked their parents in the US with their attitude of nonconformity, China is now gripped by a similar movement. Before that, the term Neijuan (内卷), (Involution) came up. It represents the feelings of many young Chinese who find themselves caught in a “rat race,” or senselessly running on a wheel like “in a hamster cage.” Young people, sociologists analyze, react to the “constantly intensifying competition from which there is no way out” with stress, burnout, and despair.
China’s CP reacted promptly to the first signs of passive social protest. Censors made Luo’s motto “Lying Flat Is Justice!” disappear online, deleted group chats, and banned booming online sales of T-shirts, teacups, and smartphone cases bearing the slogan. A month after Luo’s first posts, party media labeled “lying flat” as “shameless.”
The dreaded youth word even reached CP leader Xi Jinping, who keeps his ear to the ground when he suspects looming crises or subversive trends. In a speech on 17 August, to promote his program for common prosperity under socialism, he was “encouraging getting rich through hard work and innovation” and to “form an environment where everyone can participate in its development, avoiding ‘involution’, and ‘lying flat’.” (共同富裕要靠勤劳智慧来创造_….，避免 “内卷”、”躺平”).
Notwithstanding such interventions, online enthusiasm for flat-lying continued. In November, the China Daily devoted an entire newspaper page to the controversies surrounding the buzzword. It said, “the concept of ‘lying flat’ embodies rejection of a life and work culture where there is constant competition.” Finally, China’s National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center (国家语言资源监测与研究中心) has now confirmed that “tangping” is among the top ten most used online terms in 2021 (十大网络用语).
China’s party media are now trying to put a positive spin on “tangping”. It was, after all, just a desire “to take a nap in the perpetual struggle. Lying flat for a short time is to regain energy and start anew.” Nationalist Party newspaper Global Times had commented that tangping “recently struck a chord with many young Chinese, who are eager to take pause to breathe in this fast-paced and highly-competitive society. […] However, it is the same generation who vow, ‘We are working to revitalize the Chinese nation.’”
Even if China’s ideologues refuse to admit it, according to the motto “that what cannot be, must not be”: The party’s ideas struck a serious motivational problem among China’s youth.
Cranes at Poyang Lake in Nanchang (Jiangxi Province). Many migratory bird species from the north gather here in winter, appreciating the milder climate. The large birds also perform their dances here. Their sharp, trumpet-like cries echo across the lake.
