The number 13 is not to blame should Apple not be able to ship its new iPhone 13 model to customers on time next month. The reason lies in the labor shortage at Foxconn’s factories in China. The Taiwan-based company is Apple’s largest contract manufacturer. Migrant workers at Foxconn assemble 80 percent of Apple’s iPhones. But because the major industrial centers are less and less attractive to workers, they are now being lured with higher salaries and extra payments. Beijing also wants to better handle migration to the country in the future, as Frank Sieren analyses.
“Fight inequality!” – this could also be the slogan on German election posters. But it actually is the new program of China’s President Xi Jinping. His idea of the Chinese Dream lies in a more equal distribution of wealth. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk has looked into the details and sees a departure from Deng Xiaoping’s precept that “some should be allowed to get rich faster” in order to pull all others with them. The new goal is “shared prosperity for all,” and as equally distributed as possible.
Yan Mingfu, Mao’s former Russian interpreter and later vice-minister of civil affairs, has shed tears thinking back to his time in Qincheng Prison near Beijing. Johnny Erling spoke with him. He also conducted in-depth investigations to shed light on some myths surrounding the infamous prison, where Mao’s widow also served time. The prison is such a taboo that even China’s judiciary has no access to it.
Have a pleasant weekend!
China is still communist according to its title. Therefore, one question is particularly pressing there, and it is currently a concern for many other countries – including Germany and the US. The rich are getting richer much faster than the poor are gaining income. President Xi Jinping has now given China a direction to counteract this: China needs a more equal distribution of income growth, is his policy guideline, which state media proclaimed on Wednesday evening. Plans for more redistribution from the bottom to the top also resonate within his words.
In Party language, it read, “We should spare no effort to establish a ‘scientific’ public policy system that allows for fairer income distribution. In addition, Xi added, “the needs and opportunities of all must be coordinated according to financial sustainability.” Living standards should be strengthened “inclusively and from the bottom up.” A framework for development in which all can participate is needed. “Shared prosperity is the prosperity of all, […] not the wealth of a few,” Xi said. Common prosperity 共同富裕, in turn, is a precept of socialism.
Xi’s remarks on the occasion of the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission mark a policy change. For he is addressing a sentiment of the great reformer Deng Xiaoping and for the first time explicitly invalidating it. The People’s Daily report on the meeting stresses that those present agreed on the historic course: The party had “broken the chains of the traditional system and allowed some people and some regions to get rich faster.” Those were Deng’s words. Some were supposed to “get rich faster” and pull along everyone else. But things are different now under Xi, the commission stresses. The Central Commission now “focuses on the steady realization of common prosperity.” By focusing on the prosperity and happiness of all Chinese people, the party is securing the foundation of its rule, the People’s Daily candidly reports on the meeting.
Regardless of the party’s phrases, a change in course was long overdue. The problem is not that the lower income brackets are not making gains. In fact, with an average annual increase of 4.5 percent, the poorer half of the population has seen very decent income gains in recent decades. But for the top 0.1 percent, the increase was more than twice as high, with 9.4 percent. Both income curves are steeply climbing, but the super-rich are exponentially outpacing ordinary people. Their wealth now reaches astronomic heights.
Around two million families in China own more than ten million yuan (the equivalent of more than 1.3 million euros). Last year, they spent more than three trillion yuan (just under 400 billion euros). China now has more dollar billionaires than the US, depending on how you look at it – and that’s saying something, after all, the latter is considered the breeding ground of capitalism, with inequality running in its DNA. Even there, the chasm between rich and poor is considered a scandal that President Joe Biden aims to fix. And under socialism, such levels of inequality should be even less acceptable.
But in his speech, Xi raises another point that is very important to his compatriots. He continues to hold out the prospect of them being able to work their way up and become rich themselves. In this regard, the Chinese Dream resembles the American Dream. As an element of personal freedom, the opportunity for advancement through diligence is likely to continue to be an extremely important underlying psychological trait in China. From the perspective of economic planners, it also provides motivation to work hard. The only problem is that rising inequality (as reported by China.Table) has recently tended to reduce opportunities rather than create them. This is because capital accumulates where capital is already present. “We should reopen the channel for upward social mobility,” Xi stresses.
The global phenomenon of inequality is now firmly studied. In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty brought it back into the discussion by shifting the focus from income to capital. Unlike in the post-war decades in Germany or the decades after Deng’s reforms in China, citizens with honest employment did not have many chances of economic ascent. This is because capital tends to multiply itself at a breathtaking rate without much intervention. The reason, according to Piketty, is a lack of taxation on wealth. The central banks have been fuelling the trend since 2008. The rapid expansion of money floods markets with capital. This drives up valuations of stocks, other company shares and real estate holdings. But such assets are usually only owned by the already wealthy.
This is the reason why in Germany, too, economists and sociologists are intensively investigating this phenomenon. After all, it questions the basic assumptions of a social market economy and meritocracy. However, China, as a nominal socialist society, has to work a lot harder to at least restore a feeling of equality. The common people are well aware of how the millionaires and billionaires are settling into their ivory towers and ensuring the unfettered transfer of their wealth to their children – who just got lucky to have been born into privilege. Karl Marx would spin in his grave at the sight of this kind of socialism.
A good part of China’s current policy dates back to the attempt of handling these contradictions. The crackdown on tech companies is not just aimed at their institutional power as collectors of data, but also at the iron grip on the wealth of their founders, all of whom are now billionaires. An “important speech” by Xi like the one against inequality generally marks the beginning of a long campaign. “Shared prosperity” will become a continually repeated phrase in the months and years to come. And before the end, many billionaires will find themselves in prison – if the leadership intends to make an example of the rich.
.
In northern Beijing, about 35 kilometers from the city, hides Qincheng, the country’s notorious special prison. All party leaders from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping have had their political opponents disappear there since 1960. No journalist was allowed to glimpse behind its walls. China’s judiciary is also kept out. Qincheng answers only to the Ministry of State Security. It’s a reminder that in China, too, the revolution eats its children.
In the past, the people of Beijing told a political joke about the secretive detention center for prominent figures: “Why are you here?” one inmate asks another in the courtyard, “Because I was against Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife). And you?” “Because I supported her.” A woman standing next to them adds, “And I’m here because I’m Jiang Qing.”
There is only one detail wrong with the joke: all prisoners in Qincheng are kept in solitary confinement. They can’t even meet in the yard. US-American Sidney Rittenberg experienced it first hand. As the only foreigner, he was imprisoned by the Cultural Revolutionaries in Qincheng for nine years. He was not released until November 1977. That summer, he overheard a woman in a cell chanting praises to Chairman Mao. He recognized the voice. It was Jiang Qing.
Mao’s widow had been arrested during a Beijing palace coup after the death of her husband in October 1976. While Mao remained untouchable as a figurehead until today, all his crimes were blamed on his wife. In April1977, she was imprisoned in Qincheng and sentenced to death in a show trial in 1981. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in Qincheng. Jiang Qing took her own life on May 14, 1991.
Rittenberg knew her well. Mao and his wife had used the radical leftist foreign cultural revolutionary as their activist, letting him rise in ranks. His subsequent fall was all the harder. In his biography, “The Man who stayed behind” (Simon & Schuster), he describes how Mao’s henchmen arrested him at midnight. The arrest warrant was “signed by all 16 members of the Proletarian Headquarters, including Mao, Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing.”
As prisoner number 32 admitted to Qincheng in 1968, Rittenberg became prisoner 6832. Mao’s former Russian interpreter Yan Mingfu had already been placed behind bars for half a year under number 67124 as the 124th prisoner admitted in 1967. Accused of being a spy for Moscow, Yan remained in prison until 1975. Two decades later, I interviewed him in Beijing. Back then, he was a minister. He told me that just a few meters from his cell, his father Yan Baohuang was also imprisoned as prisoner 67100. Yan didn’t know this. Once at night, he heard someone coughing, just like his father always had. Only after his release did Yan learn that it was indeed his father, who died soon after. His ashes were tossed away. The minister cried when he told me about the cruelties in Qincheng.
Father and son were inhumanely treated by Mao and Jiang Qing, whom they had served faithfully for decades, as were countless others. At the height of the Cultural Revolutionary chaos, half of the 502 prisoners were companions of Mao, as his former secretary Li Rui recalled. Because of critical words, he made an early enemy of the dictator, who sensed enemies at every corner, and was eventually placed in solitary confinement in Qincheng for eight years. “Nearly 30 died, 20 were crippled, over 60 went insane,” he revealed in the May 2015 issue of Yanhuang Chunjiu magazine. Li Rui survived and remained sane because he secretly wrote 400 poems with a tincture made of iodine. As early as 1955, Mao had demanded for him to build a special prison for his perceived opponents
As a grotesque footnote to Cultural Revolutionary history, Li Rui notes that Feng Qiqing, the former vice-mayor of Beijing who supervised the construction of the prison for Mao, was arrested in 1968 as a “bourgeois reactionary” and also imprisoned in Qincheng until 1975. With the help of Soviet experts, modeled after Stalin’s Sukhanovka Prison, four three-story, alphabetically separated detention buildings were built, each with its own interrogation rooms and a surrounding five-meter high wall. In 1960, the new prison was put into service. In 2009, the Global People Magazine, published by the People’s Daily, first printed a 12-page exposé on Qincheng as its cover story. In fact, the prison should have been number 157 among the 156 aid projects for China in cooperation with Moscow. Because of the secrecy, this did not happen.
Global People has featured inmates incarcerated since 1960. It began with hundreds of high-ranking Kuomintang military officers, war criminals and spies in the 1960s. Then came the losers of power struggles within the party. First, the most prominent victims of Mao’s campaigns such as the 1957 anti-rights movement and his Cultural Revolution ended up in Qincheng. Then, after Mao’s death, the alleged conspirators of the “Lin Biao clique” and the “Gang of Four around Mao’s widow.” In the 1990s, prominent dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng to student leader of June 4th, Wang Dan were also imprisoned, as were Party leaders and Politburo members from Shanghai and Beijing. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the prison already had to be expanded by six new buildings.
The first comprehensive report on Qincheng was authored by journalist Yuan Ling, who interviewed some 100 former inmates and spent more than ten years researching for his Chinese book on the prison (袁凌：秦城监狱). Yuan Ling calls Qincheng the result of a “joint birth of the Soviet system with China’s authoritative system of people’s democratic dictatorship.” (它是苏维埃体制与人民民主专政权威的共同产儿.) He found no publisher in mainland China; in Hong Kong, only a small printing house dared to publish it in 2016.
This is because since Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, Qincheng has found a new use. It is widely known as the “cage for tigers” because dozens of once-famous party politicians, provincial governors, People’s Congress leaders, military brass, or CEOs of big corporations and banks from all over the country have a rendezvous behind bars. Xi had them all arrested overnight, ousted, and later formally convicted of horrendous corruption. Afterward, they all ended up in Qincheng. Many illustrious names are found among the inmates, such as Chongqing’s party leader Bo Xilai, ex-security czar Zhou Yongkang, high-ranking generals like Guo Boxiong, or CCP chief advisors like Ling Jihua.
Current reports about the prison are confidential. All that is known is that the fallen ex-elite are now housed in more comfortable, larger single cells and are better cared for than in the past. But Qincheng, to which China’s judiciary has no access, remains a place where revolution eats its own children. Once again, it is as secretive and shrouded as it had been in the past.
Chinese athletes arriving in Tokyo, where the Paralympics will be held starting Tuesday. On Thursday, the host city of Tokyo reported 5534 new infections, the second-highest level since the outbreak of the pandemic.
The number 13 is not to blame should Apple not be able to ship its new iPhone 13 model to customers on time next month. The reason lies in the labor shortage at Foxconn’s factories in China. The Taiwan-based company is Apple’s largest contract manufacturer. Migrant workers at Foxconn assemble 80 percent of Apple’s iPhones. But because the major industrial centers are less and less attractive to workers, they are now being lured with higher salaries and extra payments. Beijing also wants to better handle migration to the country in the future, as Frank Sieren analyses.
“Fight inequality!” – this could also be the slogan on German election posters. But it actually is the new program of China’s President Xi Jinping. His idea of the Chinese Dream lies in a more equal distribution of wealth. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk has looked into the details and sees a departure from Deng Xiaoping’s precept that “some should be allowed to get rich faster” in order to pull all others with them. The new goal is “shared prosperity for all,” and as equally distributed as possible.
Yan Mingfu, Mao’s former Russian interpreter and later vice-minister of civil affairs, has shed tears thinking back to his time in Qincheng Prison near Beijing. Johnny Erling spoke with him. He also conducted in-depth investigations to shed light on some myths surrounding the infamous prison, where Mao’s widow also served time. The prison is such a taboo that even China’s judiciary has no access to it.
Have a pleasant weekend!
China is still communist according to its title. Therefore, one question is particularly pressing there, and it is currently a concern for many other countries – including Germany and the US. The rich are getting richer much faster than the poor are gaining income. President Xi Jinping has now given China a direction to counteract this: China needs a more equal distribution of income growth, is his policy guideline, which state media proclaimed on Wednesday evening. Plans for more redistribution from the bottom to the top also resonate within his words.
In Party language, it read, “We should spare no effort to establish a ‘scientific’ public policy system that allows for fairer income distribution. In addition, Xi added, “the needs and opportunities of all must be coordinated according to financial sustainability.” Living standards should be strengthened “inclusively and from the bottom up.” A framework for development in which all can participate is needed. “Shared prosperity is the prosperity of all, […] not the wealth of a few,” Xi said. Common prosperity 共同富裕, in turn, is a precept of socialism.
Xi’s remarks on the occasion of the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission mark a policy change. For he is addressing a sentiment of the great reformer Deng Xiaoping and for the first time explicitly invalidating it. The People’s Daily report on the meeting stresses that those present agreed on the historic course: The party had “broken the chains of the traditional system and allowed some people and some regions to get rich faster.” Those were Deng’s words. Some were supposed to “get rich faster” and pull along everyone else. But things are different now under Xi, the commission stresses. The Central Commission now “focuses on the steady realization of common prosperity.” By focusing on the prosperity and happiness of all Chinese people, the party is securing the foundation of its rule, the People’s Daily candidly reports on the meeting.
Regardless of the party’s phrases, a change in course was long overdue. The problem is not that the lower income brackets are not making gains. In fact, with an average annual increase of 4.5 percent, the poorer half of the population has seen very decent income gains in recent decades. But for the top 0.1 percent, the increase was more than twice as high, with 9.4 percent. Both income curves are steeply climbing, but the super-rich are exponentially outpacing ordinary people. Their wealth now reaches astronomic heights.
Around two million families in China own more than ten million yuan (the equivalent of more than 1.3 million euros). Last year, they spent more than three trillion yuan (just under 400 billion euros). China now has more dollar billionaires than the US, depending on how you look at it – and that’s saying something, after all, the latter is considered the breeding ground of capitalism, with inequality running in its DNA. Even there, the chasm between rich and poor is considered a scandal that President Joe Biden aims to fix. And under socialism, such levels of inequality should be even less acceptable.
But in his speech, Xi raises another point that is very important to his compatriots. He continues to hold out the prospect of them being able to work their way up and become rich themselves. In this regard, the Chinese Dream resembles the American Dream. As an element of personal freedom, the opportunity for advancement through diligence is likely to continue to be an extremely important underlying psychological trait in China. From the perspective of economic planners, it also provides motivation to work hard. The only problem is that rising inequality (as reported by China.Table) has recently tended to reduce opportunities rather than create them. This is because capital accumulates where capital is already present. “We should reopen the channel for upward social mobility,” Xi stresses.
The global phenomenon of inequality is now firmly studied. In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty brought it back into the discussion by shifting the focus from income to capital. Unlike in the post-war decades in Germany or the decades after Deng’s reforms in China, citizens with honest employment did not have many chances of economic ascent. This is because capital tends to multiply itself at a breathtaking rate without much intervention. The reason, according to Piketty, is a lack of taxation on wealth. The central banks have been fuelling the trend since 2008. The rapid expansion of money floods markets with capital. This drives up valuations of stocks, other company shares and real estate holdings. But such assets are usually only owned by the already wealthy.
This is the reason why in Germany, too, economists and sociologists are intensively investigating this phenomenon. After all, it questions the basic assumptions of a social market economy and meritocracy. However, China, as a nominal socialist society, has to work a lot harder to at least restore a feeling of equality. The common people are well aware of how the millionaires and billionaires are settling into their ivory towers and ensuring the unfettered transfer of their wealth to their children – who just got lucky to have been born into privilege. Karl Marx would spin in his grave at the sight of this kind of socialism.
A good part of China’s current policy dates back to the attempt of handling these contradictions. The crackdown on tech companies is not just aimed at their institutional power as collectors of data, but also at the iron grip on the wealth of their founders, all of whom are now billionaires. An “important speech” by Xi like the one against inequality generally marks the beginning of a long campaign. “Shared prosperity” will become a continually repeated phrase in the months and years to come. And before the end, many billionaires will find themselves in prison – if the leadership intends to make an example of the rich.
.
In northern Beijing, about 35 kilometers from the city, hides Qincheng, the country’s notorious special prison. All party leaders from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping have had their political opponents disappear there since 1960. No journalist was allowed to glimpse behind its walls. China’s judiciary is also kept out. Qincheng answers only to the Ministry of State Security. It’s a reminder that in China, too, the revolution eats its children.
In the past, the people of Beijing told a political joke about the secretive detention center for prominent figures: “Why are you here?” one inmate asks another in the courtyard, “Because I was against Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife). And you?” “Because I supported her.” A woman standing next to them adds, “And I’m here because I’m Jiang Qing.”
There is only one detail wrong with the joke: all prisoners in Qincheng are kept in solitary confinement. They can’t even meet in the yard. US-American Sidney Rittenberg experienced it first hand. As the only foreigner, he was imprisoned by the Cultural Revolutionaries in Qincheng for nine years. He was not released until November 1977. That summer, he overheard a woman in a cell chanting praises to Chairman Mao. He recognized the voice. It was Jiang Qing.
Mao’s widow had been arrested during a Beijing palace coup after the death of her husband in October 1976. While Mao remained untouchable as a figurehead until today, all his crimes were blamed on his wife. In April1977, she was imprisoned in Qincheng and sentenced to death in a show trial in 1981. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in Qincheng. Jiang Qing took her own life on May 14, 1991.
Rittenberg knew her well. Mao and his wife had used the radical leftist foreign cultural revolutionary as their activist, letting him rise in ranks. His subsequent fall was all the harder. In his biography, “The Man who stayed behind” (Simon & Schuster), he describes how Mao’s henchmen arrested him at midnight. The arrest warrant was “signed by all 16 members of the Proletarian Headquarters, including Mao, Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing.”
As prisoner number 32 admitted to Qincheng in 1968, Rittenberg became prisoner 6832. Mao’s former Russian interpreter Yan Mingfu had already been placed behind bars for half a year under number 67124 as the 124th prisoner admitted in 1967. Accused of being a spy for Moscow, Yan remained in prison until 1975. Two decades later, I interviewed him in Beijing. Back then, he was a minister. He told me that just a few meters from his cell, his father Yan Baohuang was also imprisoned as prisoner 67100. Yan didn’t know this. Once at night, he heard someone coughing, just like his father always had. Only after his release did Yan learn that it was indeed his father, who died soon after. His ashes were tossed away. The minister cried when he told me about the cruelties in Qincheng.
Father and son were inhumanely treated by Mao and Jiang Qing, whom they had served faithfully for decades, as were countless others. At the height of the Cultural Revolutionary chaos, half of the 502 prisoners were companions of Mao, as his former secretary Li Rui recalled. Because of critical words, he made an early enemy of the dictator, who sensed enemies at every corner, and was eventually placed in solitary confinement in Qincheng for eight years. “Nearly 30 died, 20 were crippled, over 60 went insane,” he revealed in the May 2015 issue of Yanhuang Chunjiu magazine. Li Rui survived and remained sane because he secretly wrote 400 poems with a tincture made of iodine. As early as 1955, Mao had demanded for him to build a special prison for his perceived opponents
As a grotesque footnote to Cultural Revolutionary history, Li Rui notes that Feng Qiqing, the former vice-mayor of Beijing who supervised the construction of the prison for Mao, was arrested in 1968 as a “bourgeois reactionary” and also imprisoned in Qincheng until 1975. With the help of Soviet experts, modeled after Stalin’s Sukhanovka Prison, four three-story, alphabetically separated detention buildings were built, each with its own interrogation rooms and a surrounding five-meter high wall. In 1960, the new prison was put into service. In 2009, the Global People Magazine, published by the People’s Daily, first printed a 12-page exposé on Qincheng as its cover story. In fact, the prison should have been number 157 among the 156 aid projects for China in cooperation with Moscow. Because of the secrecy, this did not happen.
Global People has featured inmates incarcerated since 1960. It began with hundreds of high-ranking Kuomintang military officers, war criminals and spies in the 1960s. Then came the losers of power struggles within the party. First, the most prominent victims of Mao’s campaigns such as the 1957 anti-rights movement and his Cultural Revolution ended up in Qincheng. Then, after Mao’s death, the alleged conspirators of the “Lin Biao clique” and the “Gang of Four around Mao’s widow.” In the 1990s, prominent dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng to student leader of June 4th, Wang Dan were also imprisoned, as were Party leaders and Politburo members from Shanghai and Beijing. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the prison already had to be expanded by six new buildings.
The first comprehensive report on Qincheng was authored by journalist Yuan Ling, who interviewed some 100 former inmates and spent more than ten years researching for his Chinese book on the prison (袁凌：秦城监狱). Yuan Ling calls Qincheng the result of a “joint birth of the Soviet system with China’s authoritative system of people’s democratic dictatorship.” (它是苏维埃体制与人民民主专政权威的共同产儿.) He found no publisher in mainland China; in Hong Kong, only a small printing house dared to publish it in 2016.
This is because since Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, Qincheng has found a new use. It is widely known as the “cage for tigers” because dozens of once-famous party politicians, provincial governors, People’s Congress leaders, military brass, or CEOs of big corporations and banks from all over the country have a rendezvous behind bars. Xi had them all arrested overnight, ousted, and later formally convicted of horrendous corruption. Afterward, they all ended up in Qincheng. Many illustrious names are found among the inmates, such as Chongqing’s party leader Bo Xilai, ex-security czar Zhou Yongkang, high-ranking generals like Guo Boxiong, or CCP chief advisors like Ling Jihua.
Current reports about the prison are confidential. All that is known is that the fallen ex-elite are now housed in more comfortable, larger single cells and are better cared for than in the past. But Qincheng, to which China’s judiciary has no access, remains a place where revolution eats its own children. Once again, it is as secretive and shrouded as it had been in the past.
Chinese athletes arriving in Tokyo, where the Paralympics will be held starting Tuesday. On Thursday, the host city of Tokyo reported 5534 new infections, the second-highest level since the outbreak of the pandemic.
