When a company is organized as a private enterprise but acts on behalf of the state, it almost inevitably finds itself in a quandary. Decisions that are good for business rarely coincide with the needs of the common good and other political demands. A particularly apparent example is the Chinese railroad company, China Rail. The company’s tasks include: Stimulating the economy in remote regions, training young people, providing eco-friendly mobility, and achieving high punctuality. But making profits is not one of them. The state-owned company is already groaning under a debt of almost €1 trillion and continues to build unprofitable lines in the countryside, writes our team in Beijing.
“Thoughts are free” – perhaps the lyrics of this old German song will need to be rewritten in the future. Being able to read information from human brains is not only a common plot element in science fiction stories. It would also be the absolute dream of authoritarian systems. It would make it possible to detect critical thoughts before they can be expressed or result in actions. Preventive detention would certainly contribute exceptionally to social stability. China has run the first tests of machine mind-reading on students watching pornography, writes Frank Sieren. But every new technology starts simple.
17+1 became 16+1, and now, in one fell swoop, 14+1. Estonia and Latvia have left China’s East and Central Europe Roundtable after Lithuania led the way last year. It’s a blow to Chinese foreign policy that shows how much the world has moved on in the past five years. At the time, there was a perception that Beijing’s foreign policy was poaching at the EU’s eastern border.
Today, the number 14 evokes unfavorable associations with the word yàosǐ 要死, which is pronounced the same way – it literally means “must die,” and is also used in the sense of “extraordinary, terrible.” This is also not a good omen for Eastern and Central European cooperation. Chinese love such plays of words and take them seriously. Today, Johnny Erling describes how the net citizens dupe the censors through the creative use of characters.
Unlike in Germany, anyone traveling by high-speed train in China these days need not fear ending up on an overcrowded train. Because the strict Covid measures have made every trip an almost incalculable risk, people prefer to stay where they are. Even between Shanghai and Beijing, there were much fewer passengers – although this connection has been one of the few profitable railroad lines.
In the first half of the year, the track made a loss for the first time. Against the background of the lockdown in Shanghai, this is no surprise. According to the Chinese business magazine Caixin, the loss amounted to the equivalent of around €150 million. Nationwide, train traffic also declined recently. According to official figures, only 787 million Chinese traveled by train in the first half of the year – a drop of 42 percent year on year.
Declining passenger volumes are now exacerbating a long-standing dilemma. New railroad construction primarily serves the overarching goals of economic policy. The state orders the projects. Goals regarding the return on investment are not only secondary, they are simply non-existent. But the discrepancy between the high costs of the lines and their meager utilization is growing. And with it, the mountain of debt of the state-owned companies that are financing the construction.
However, the high losses of the operating companies are not stopping the state-owned rail giant China Railway from continuing to expand the network vigorously. The high-speed train network grew from almost 2,200 kilometers to over 40,000, last year alone. A large part was built in remote areas – where not only the construction through mountains, swamps, and deserts is particularly challenging, but where also very few people live.
In the first half of 2022 alone, another 2,044 kilometers were added. The network, which is already the longest in the world, is set to grow to around 50,000 kilometers by 2025, rising to 70,000 kilometers by 2035. By comparison, the length of the high-speed lines in Germany, which is admittedly significantly smaller, is around 2,600 kilometers.
Discussions about whether all these additional kilometers are even needed in view of the new travel habits in the Covid era are practically non-existent. Instead, local governments, in cooperation with China Railway, are competing to push as many new lines and projects as possible in their regions. Growth increases in the short term, at least in the construction phase.
The problem is that new lines are a popular tool for the government to stimulate the economy. Construction creates jobs, and the newly connected regions get an uplift in development. “The government’s priority is economic growth but they turn a blind eye to its enormous debt and operating losses,” Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Transport University, recently criticized in an article in the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei.
According to Zhao’s calculations, each kilometer of a new high-speed train line costs between ¥120 to ¥130 million (about €18 million), which means that the additional 30,000 kilometers planned by 2035 alone would cost about ¥3.6 trillion, or the equivalent of about €520 billion. However, a large part of the line will never actually earn money to recoup these investments.
For the state-owned China Railway, the investments mean that the issuance of new bonds will further increase its already astronomical debt. At the end of 2021, it amounted to the equivalent of around €860 billion, or five percent of China’s economic output. If the debt continues to rise at the current pace, it is likely to break the €1 trillion mark within the next three years. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warns Germany against being too dependent on China. Diversification in imports of raw materials is crucial, Scholz said Thursday at the chancellor’s summer press conference. German companies also understood this, he said. He also stated that Germany will thus have to ensure that lithium, for example, is sourced from different parts of the world. Regarding a possible inaugural visit to China, the chancellor said it was being discussed, but there is no date so far.
Germany is particularly dependent on China for rare earths and magnesium. For other raw materials, there are indirect dependencies because China dominates supply chains and the further processing of certain raw materials (China.Table reported). There are also many dependencies on intermediate and final goods such as pharmaceuticals, solar cells, batteries, chemicals, and electronics. Many companies also generate a large part of their sales on the Chinese market. These multiple dependencies are causing some players to rethink their position (China.Table reported). In the short term, however, Germany’s dependence on China is unlikely to be reduced – and such a course would come at a cost.
A very similar assessment came from the business community. BDI President Siegfried Russwurm warned that Germany should “not fundamentally question its economic relations with China, even in the context of the new system competition.” However, Russwurm drew a lesson from the country’s gas dependency on Russia, saying that Germany must be “better prepared for extreme scenarios.” The goal, he said, must be to “diversify sales and procurement markets.” nib
What is the connection between the translated name for “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs” (白雪公主和七个小矮人) and the characters for the date “May 35” (五月三十五) or with the Chinese term “The Driving-In-Reverse-Emperor” (倒车帝)? Why is China’s urban youth and the country’s middle class attracted to three new alleged sciences, involution (内卷), lying flat (躺平), and runology (润学)? The answers can be found online. The ominous code words are allusions to Chinese leaders, to political or social grievances of the kind that are not allowed to appear in the official media. But online, nasty satire, provocative puns, and political attacks escape China’s strict censorship time and again. Brewing resentment is finding an outlet virtually, which, according to Beijing’s propaganda, neither exists nor should exist in the new era under people’s leader Xi Jinping and his Chinese dream.
Since spring, the ominous doctrine of “run” has been haunting all websites. To understand what it means, you have to pronounce the character “to run” just like in English, which then means “let’s get out of here”. With their new word creation, Shanghai citizens decried the Covid lockdown of their authorities, who had them locked up for weeks. In early August, the website for microblogs in China chose it as the “Weibo Word of the Week”.
Media expert David Bandursky explains that the new term is part of a triad of trendy online protests. They reflect the exit fantasies of a Generation Z that is constantly fed up and overburdened by indoctrination and coercion by China’s Party. This generation no longer wants to chase after a career in the rat race of school, university, and work. First, they called it “involution,” then they invented “lying flat” as a second buzzword for their inner emigration. Now they dream of “running away”.
China’s leadership sees red, notes Joseph Brouwer, who has been watching the cat-and-mouse game of social media censorship for a decade. On the website “Chinadigitaltimes.net,” he writes: “In my many years of following China’s censorship saga, I have never seen the government so determined to punish. It is not willing to tolerate the slightest expression of dissent or disapproval from its citizens.” Especially not before the approaching 20th Party Congress in late fall, at which Party leader Xi plans to have his third term in office approved from 2022 to 2027, effectively cementing his absolute rule for life. The Internet is rumbling, “and that’s putting it mildly”.
In July, censorship authorities launched a new campaign against misuse of the Internet and called for political cleansing of cyberspace. There, ambiguous and homophonic characters, word variants, and “typos” are supposedly being used to “spread harmful information“.
While CP propagandists do everything they can to bring public opinion in traditional media into ideological line or fuel up patriotic sentiment, they cannot handle the backlash on the Net. Sophisticated innuendos, especially in sheer mass, not only overwhelm the physical army of censors. Even sophisticated surveillance with algorithms and artificial intelligence cannot get a grip on the constantly changing gibberish and the mixture of Mandarin and English, alphabetic, Chinese or Roman numeral symbols, and traditional and simplified characters. The biggest problem is homophones, words with the same pronunciation that are spelled differently. Despite its Great Firewall, the Internet remains a hotbed of “subversion” for Beijing.
The camouflaged protests online differ from the old Chinese cultural tradition of intellectual resistance to rulers. Once upon a time, for example, the oppositional Beijing functionary Deng Tuo exposed Mao’s megalomaniacal dreams in 153 satirical essays and historical analogies. His columns appeared openly in the Beijing Evening Newspaper after 1960 under the title “Evening Talks at Yanshan” (Yanshan yehua 燕山夜话). Later, dictator Mao took terrible revenge on him.
Criticism in the offline world has long been suppressed by today’s Party bureaucracy under leader Xi. The web has become a stage for protests, with websites like Chinadigitaltimes keeping track of Beijing’s censors’ battle against unwelcome political innuendo since 2011. In 2017, they expanded their search to all major social media platforms; in addition to Sina Weibo新浪微博, WeChat微信, Zhihu知乎, Douyin抖音 (the Chinese mother of TikTok), Kuaishou快手和 and Bilibili.
600 million active users, each with their own social media accounts, are an absolute censorship mammoth task for Beijing. The details of how this is being done were revealed to Bouwer when a 143-page document was leaked to his website, Chinadigitaltimes. It came from the Instagram-like social platform Xiaohongshu (小红书), which was founded for online shopping and networking. This platform internally evaluated all critical posts and developed countermeasures. Among their collected sensitive words (敏感词) were also more than 500 terms, designations, spellings or phrases referring to party leader Xi.
He is sometimes described as a “Driving-In-Reverse-Emperor,” a lover of Chinese “ravioli pockets” (习包子), as the supreme censor and “harmonizer” (习和谐). Or his name is verbalized with that of other dictators. North Korea’s Kim Il-song, for example, becomes Xi Il-song (习正日). The expressions are chosen so that everyone knows who is meant, but are altered in such a way that the censorship algorithms cannot immediately identify and block them.
This also applies to all other terms strictly forbidden by censorship, such as the taboo events of the Beijing Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. In 2004, I first came across a microblog calling for mourning for Memorial Day, which gave the date as “May 35th” (五月三十五). If you do the math, you’ll come up with June 4. Beijing immediately outlawed the spelling May 35th. But posts then switched to Roman numerals. June 4 became the number “ⅥⅣ” or “1-9-8-9 IIXVIIIIX.” Ten years later, in 2014, censorship expert Jason Q. Ng already counted 64 paraphrases on the Internet for the memory of the massacre. In the meantime, there are even more.
There are no limits to the ingenuity of subverting censorship time and again. Internet authorities just banned public reports of the recent mass protests by savers in Henan Province (河南), who were cheated out of their deposits by regional banks. China’s financial stability must not be questioned. Bloggers then unceremoniously renamed Henan province Helan (荷兰), which means Holland. Or they manipulated the character for Henan. They wrote it without the money symbol in its middle part. Meaning: The banks in the scandal province are broke.
But what does all this have to do with the online fuss about “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that I mentioned at the beginning? It was sparked by online reports claiming that Shanghai’s preschools had to remove Grimm’s fairy tales from their collections. Bloggers were upset about China’s cultural officials, who had everything banned in advance of the 20th Party Congress that could lead to allusions to Party leader Xi. This is because Snow White, which is also popular in China, might remind people of how Xi visited Beijing’s Mao Mausoleum with members of his Politburo Committee on the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic. All seven are said to have bowed before the crystal coffin of the embalmed chairman.
This sounded so absurd, even by China’s standards, that the daily newspaper “Beijing News” sent reporters to Shanghai. They immediately reported on August 2 that the official “anti-rumor platform” in Shanghai spoke of fake news. But those who read between the lines were proven wrong. The reporters wrote that they had asked several preschools whether the report of the Snow White ban was true. They only said that it was “not opportune for them to answer”.
So official censorship in China is taking on ever more curious forms. Good thing that there is at least an outlet on the Internet.
Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema visits a memorial park built to honor Chinese nationals who died in the 1970s during construction of the nearly 1,900-kilometer railroad line from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.
When a company is organized as a private enterprise but acts on behalf of the state, it almost inevitably finds itself in a quandary. Decisions that are good for business rarely coincide with the needs of the common good and other political demands. A particularly apparent example is the Chinese railroad company, China Rail. The company’s tasks include: Stimulating the economy in remote regions, training young people, providing eco-friendly mobility, and achieving high punctuality. But making profits is not one of them. The state-owned company is already groaning under a debt of almost €1 trillion and continues to build unprofitable lines in the countryside, writes our team in Beijing.
“Thoughts are free” – perhaps the lyrics of this old German song will need to be rewritten in the future. Being able to read information from human brains is not only a common plot element in science fiction stories. It would also be the absolute dream of authoritarian systems. It would make it possible to detect critical thoughts before they can be expressed or result in actions. Preventive detention would certainly contribute exceptionally to social stability. China has run the first tests of machine mind-reading on students watching pornography, writes Frank Sieren. But every new technology starts simple.
17+1 became 16+1, and now, in one fell swoop, 14+1. Estonia and Latvia have left China’s East and Central Europe Roundtable after Lithuania led the way last year. It’s a blow to Chinese foreign policy that shows how much the world has moved on in the past five years. At the time, there was a perception that Beijing’s foreign policy was poaching at the EU’s eastern border.
Today, the number 14 evokes unfavorable associations with the word yàosǐ 要死, which is pronounced the same way – it literally means “must die,” and is also used in the sense of “extraordinary, terrible.” This is also not a good omen for Eastern and Central European cooperation. Chinese love such plays of words and take them seriously. Today, Johnny Erling describes how the net citizens dupe the censors through the creative use of characters.
Unlike in Germany, anyone traveling by high-speed train in China these days need not fear ending up on an overcrowded train. Because the strict Covid measures have made every trip an almost incalculable risk, people prefer to stay where they are. Even between Shanghai and Beijing, there were much fewer passengers – although this connection has been one of the few profitable railroad lines.
In the first half of the year, the track made a loss for the first time. Against the background of the lockdown in Shanghai, this is no surprise. According to the Chinese business magazine Caixin, the loss amounted to the equivalent of around €150 million. Nationwide, train traffic also declined recently. According to official figures, only 787 million Chinese traveled by train in the first half of the year – a drop of 42 percent year on year.
Declining passenger volumes are now exacerbating a long-standing dilemma. New railroad construction primarily serves the overarching goals of economic policy. The state orders the projects. Goals regarding the return on investment are not only secondary, they are simply non-existent. But the discrepancy between the high costs of the lines and their meager utilization is growing. And with it, the mountain of debt of the state-owned companies that are financing the construction.
However, the high losses of the operating companies are not stopping the state-owned rail giant China Railway from continuing to expand the network vigorously. The high-speed train network grew from almost 2,200 kilometers to over 40,000, last year alone. A large part was built in remote areas – where not only the construction through mountains, swamps, and deserts is particularly challenging, but where also very few people live.
In the first half of 2022 alone, another 2,044 kilometers were added. The network, which is already the longest in the world, is set to grow to around 50,000 kilometers by 2025, rising to 70,000 kilometers by 2035. By comparison, the length of the high-speed lines in Germany, which is admittedly significantly smaller, is around 2,600 kilometers.
Discussions about whether all these additional kilometers are even needed in view of the new travel habits in the Covid era are practically non-existent. Instead, local governments, in cooperation with China Railway, are competing to push as many new lines and projects as possible in their regions. Growth increases in the short term, at least in the construction phase.
The problem is that new lines are a popular tool for the government to stimulate the economy. Construction creates jobs, and the newly connected regions get an uplift in development. “The government’s priority is economic growth but they turn a blind eye to its enormous debt and operating losses,” Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Transport University, recently criticized in an article in the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei.
According to Zhao’s calculations, each kilometer of a new high-speed train line costs between ¥120 to ¥130 million (about €18 million), which means that the additional 30,000 kilometers planned by 2035 alone would cost about ¥3.6 trillion, or the equivalent of about €520 billion. However, a large part of the line will never actually earn money to recoup these investments.
For the state-owned China Railway, the investments mean that the issuance of new bonds will further increase its already astronomical debt. At the end of 2021, it amounted to the equivalent of around €860 billion, or five percent of China’s economic output. If the debt continues to rise at the current pace, it is likely to break the €1 trillion mark within the next three years. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warns Germany against being too dependent on China. Diversification in imports of raw materials is crucial, Scholz said Thursday at the chancellor’s summer press conference. German companies also understood this, he said. He also stated that Germany will thus have to ensure that lithium, for example, is sourced from different parts of the world. Regarding a possible inaugural visit to China, the chancellor said it was being discussed, but there is no date so far.
Germany is particularly dependent on China for rare earths and magnesium. For other raw materials, there are indirect dependencies because China dominates supply chains and the further processing of certain raw materials (China.Table reported). There are also many dependencies on intermediate and final goods such as pharmaceuticals, solar cells, batteries, chemicals, and electronics. Many companies also generate a large part of their sales on the Chinese market. These multiple dependencies are causing some players to rethink their position (China.Table reported). In the short term, however, Germany’s dependence on China is unlikely to be reduced – and such a course would come at a cost.
A very similar assessment came from the business community. BDI President Siegfried Russwurm warned that Germany should “not fundamentally question its economic relations with China, even in the context of the new system competition.” However, Russwurm drew a lesson from the country’s gas dependency on Russia, saying that Germany must be “better prepared for extreme scenarios.” The goal, he said, must be to “diversify sales and procurement markets.” nib
What is the connection between the translated name for “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs” (白雪公主和七个小矮人) and the characters for the date “May 35” (五月三十五) or with the Chinese term “The Driving-In-Reverse-Emperor” (倒车帝)? Why is China’s urban youth and the country’s middle class attracted to three new alleged sciences, involution (内卷), lying flat (躺平), and runology (润学)? The answers can be found online. The ominous code words are allusions to Chinese leaders, to political or social grievances of the kind that are not allowed to appear in the official media. But online, nasty satire, provocative puns, and political attacks escape China’s strict censorship time and again. Brewing resentment is finding an outlet virtually, which, according to Beijing’s propaganda, neither exists nor should exist in the new era under people’s leader Xi Jinping and his Chinese dream.
Since spring, the ominous doctrine of “run” has been haunting all websites. To understand what it means, you have to pronounce the character “to run” just like in English, which then means “let’s get out of here”. With their new word creation, Shanghai citizens decried the Covid lockdown of their authorities, who had them locked up for weeks. In early August, the website for microblogs in China chose it as the “Weibo Word of the Week”.
Media expert David Bandursky explains that the new term is part of a triad of trendy online protests. They reflect the exit fantasies of a Generation Z that is constantly fed up and overburdened by indoctrination and coercion by China’s Party. This generation no longer wants to chase after a career in the rat race of school, university, and work. First, they called it “involution,” then they invented “lying flat” as a second buzzword for their inner emigration. Now they dream of “running away”.
China’s leadership sees red, notes Joseph Brouwer, who has been watching the cat-and-mouse game of social media censorship for a decade. On the website “Chinadigitaltimes.net,” he writes: “In my many years of following China’s censorship saga, I have never seen the government so determined to punish. It is not willing to tolerate the slightest expression of dissent or disapproval from its citizens.” Especially not before the approaching 20th Party Congress in late fall, at which Party leader Xi plans to have his third term in office approved from 2022 to 2027, effectively cementing his absolute rule for life. The Internet is rumbling, “and that’s putting it mildly”.
In July, censorship authorities launched a new campaign against misuse of the Internet and called for political cleansing of cyberspace. There, ambiguous and homophonic characters, word variants, and “typos” are supposedly being used to “spread harmful information“.
While CP propagandists do everything they can to bring public opinion in traditional media into ideological line or fuel up patriotic sentiment, they cannot handle the backlash on the Net. Sophisticated innuendos, especially in sheer mass, not only overwhelm the physical army of censors. Even sophisticated surveillance with algorithms and artificial intelligence cannot get a grip on the constantly changing gibberish and the mixture of Mandarin and English, alphabetic, Chinese or Roman numeral symbols, and traditional and simplified characters. The biggest problem is homophones, words with the same pronunciation that are spelled differently. Despite its Great Firewall, the Internet remains a hotbed of “subversion” for Beijing.
The camouflaged protests online differ from the old Chinese cultural tradition of intellectual resistance to rulers. Once upon a time, for example, the oppositional Beijing functionary Deng Tuo exposed Mao’s megalomaniacal dreams in 153 satirical essays and historical analogies. His columns appeared openly in the Beijing Evening Newspaper after 1960 under the title “Evening Talks at Yanshan” (Yanshan yehua 燕山夜话). Later, dictator Mao took terrible revenge on him.
Criticism in the offline world has long been suppressed by today’s Party bureaucracy under leader Xi. The web has become a stage for protests, with websites like Chinadigitaltimes keeping track of Beijing’s censors’ battle against unwelcome political innuendo since 2011. In 2017, they expanded their search to all major social media platforms; in addition to Sina Weibo新浪微博, WeChat微信, Zhihu知乎, Douyin抖音 (the Chinese mother of TikTok), Kuaishou快手和 and Bilibili.
600 million active users, each with their own social media accounts, are an absolute censorship mammoth task for Beijing. The details of how this is being done were revealed to Bouwer when a 143-page document was leaked to his website, Chinadigitaltimes. It came from the Instagram-like social platform Xiaohongshu (小红书), which was founded for online shopping and networking. This platform internally evaluated all critical posts and developed countermeasures. Among their collected sensitive words (敏感词) were also more than 500 terms, designations, spellings or phrases referring to party leader Xi.
He is sometimes described as a “Driving-In-Reverse-Emperor,” a lover of Chinese “ravioli pockets” (习包子), as the supreme censor and “harmonizer” (习和谐). Or his name is verbalized with that of other dictators. North Korea’s Kim Il-song, for example, becomes Xi Il-song (习正日). The expressions are chosen so that everyone knows who is meant, but are altered in such a way that the censorship algorithms cannot immediately identify and block them.
This also applies to all other terms strictly forbidden by censorship, such as the taboo events of the Beijing Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. In 2004, I first came across a microblog calling for mourning for Memorial Day, which gave the date as “May 35th” (五月三十五). If you do the math, you’ll come up with June 4. Beijing immediately outlawed the spelling May 35th. But posts then switched to Roman numerals. June 4 became the number “ⅥⅣ” or “1-9-8-9 IIXVIIIIX.” Ten years later, in 2014, censorship expert Jason Q. Ng already counted 64 paraphrases on the Internet for the memory of the massacre. In the meantime, there are even more.
There are no limits to the ingenuity of subverting censorship time and again. Internet authorities just banned public reports of the recent mass protests by savers in Henan Province (河南), who were cheated out of their deposits by regional banks. China’s financial stability must not be questioned. Bloggers then unceremoniously renamed Henan province Helan (荷兰), which means Holland. Or they manipulated the character for Henan. They wrote it without the money symbol in its middle part. Meaning: The banks in the scandal province are broke.
But what does all this have to do with the online fuss about “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that I mentioned at the beginning? It was sparked by online reports claiming that Shanghai’s preschools had to remove Grimm’s fairy tales from their collections. Bloggers were upset about China’s cultural officials, who had everything banned in advance of the 20th Party Congress that could lead to allusions to Party leader Xi. This is because Snow White, which is also popular in China, might remind people of how Xi visited Beijing’s Mao Mausoleum with members of his Politburo Committee on the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic. All seven are said to have bowed before the crystal coffin of the embalmed chairman.
This sounded so absurd, even by China’s standards, that the daily newspaper “Beijing News” sent reporters to Shanghai. They immediately reported on August 2 that the official “anti-rumor platform” in Shanghai spoke of fake news. But those who read between the lines were proven wrong. The reporters wrote that they had asked several preschools whether the report of the Snow White ban was true. They only said that it was “not opportune for them to answer”.
So official censorship in China is taking on ever more curious forms. Good thing that there is at least an outlet on the Internet.
Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema visits a memorial park built to honor Chinese nationals who died in the 1970s during construction of the nearly 1,900-kilometer railroad line from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.
