Category: China

“In the Face of the Sickles, What Can the Wheat Do?”

A low-budget movie depicting a poor couple’s struggle in rural China surprised many with a run at the Chinese box office that dwarfed some blockbusters. Now, many are wondering why they can’t watch it.

“Return to Dust” depicts two outcasts, a woman with a physical disability and a farmer too poor to marry, who get together in a marriage arranged by their families. With a realistic style, Li Ruijun, the director, tells the story of the hardships they face.

The movie, which features mostly locals in China’s western Gansu province rather than professional actors, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and started screening in China in July. It quickly gained a following on social media. By early September, daily ticket revenue topped 10 million yuan ($1.4 million), surpassing big-budget movies such as “Minions: The Rise of Gru.”

. . .

The movie’s disappearance came just ahead of a twice-a-decade Communist Party Congress in mid-October, at which President Xi Jinping is expected to secure a third term in power.

Hashtags about the movie and its removal on social-media platform Weibo became unclickable, a sign that the discussion was considered sensitive. Some blog posts on China’s do-everything app, WeChat, that asked why the movie was removed online also disappeared.

Weibo didn’t respond to a request for comment. iQIYI and Huawei Technologies Co., which operate major streaming platforms, didn’t reply to requests for comment. Tencent Holdings Ltd., which owns Tencent Video and WeChat, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

China’s National Radio and Television Administration, the country’s broadcasting authority, didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.

. . .

Many social-media discussions centered on how the lives of the couple in the movie were exploited by those in power. For example, in one scene, a wealthy man in the village pressures the husband to donate blood for his sick father.

In a line from the movie widely cited by social media users, the husband says, “In the face of the sickles, what can the wheat do?”

For the full story, see:

Liyan Qi. “?Chinese Fans of Popular Movie ‘Return to Dust’ Wonder What Happened to It.” wsj.com Posted Sunday, October 2, 2022), URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-fans-of-popular-movie-return-to-dust-wonder-what-happened-to-it-11664721604?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: As of 10/6/22, the article had not appeared in the print version of the WSJ.)

Wittgenstein Center’s Scenario Has Global Population Peak in 2050 at 8.7 Billion

(p. A2) Since the 1960s, when the global number of people first hit three billion, it has taken a bit over a decade to cross each new billion-person milestone, and so it might seem natural to assume that nine billion humans and then 10 billion are, inexorably, just around the corner. That is exactly what the latest population projections from the U.N. and the U.S. Census Bureau have calculated.

. . .

The U.N.’s projections are the best known. But an alternate set of projections has been gaining attention in recent years, spearheaded by the demographer Wolfgang Lutz, under the auspices of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital at the University of Vienna, of which Mr. Lutz is founding director.

. . .

“There’s two big questions,” Mr. Lutz explains, that determine whether his forecasts or the U.N.’s end up closer to the mark. “First, how rapidly fertility will decline in Africa…. The other question is China, and countries with very low fertility, if they will recover and how fast they will recover.”

. . .

The Wittgenstein forecasts, by contrast, look not only at historical patterns, but attempt to ask why birthrates rise and fall. A big factor, not formally included in the U.N.’s models, is education levels. Put simply: As people, especially women, have greater opportunities to pursue education, they have smaller families.

. . .

The U.N. projects Africa’s population will grow from 1.3 billion today to 3.9 billion by century’s end.

Once education is accounted for, Wittgenstein’s baseline scenario projects Africa’s population will rise to 2.9 billion during that time period. In another scenario from Wittgenstein, which it calls the “rapid development” scenario, the population of Africa will only reach 1.7 billion by century’s end.

Wittgenstein’s phrase “rapid development” is revealing: This isn’t a forecast of doom and decline, but rather one in which health and education simply improve, a world with better human well-being, lower mortality, and medium levels of immigration.

. . .

Wittgenstein’s rapid-development scenario has the global population topping out at 8.7 billion in 2050.

For the full commentary see:

Josh Zumbrun. “THE NUMBERS; As Population Nears 8 Billion, Some See Peak.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2022): A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 12, 2022, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; Global Population Is About to Hit 8 Billion—and Some Argue It Is Near Its Peak.”)

Those Who Survived Dictatorship Know We Need “More Freedom, More Speech, Not Less”

(p. A19) The left’s reaction to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric was instructive. Anyone who mentioned the lab-leak theory was assailed as pro-Trump. Social-media companies removed posts mentioning it. By January 2021, it was obvious that shutting down debate was the true antiscience position. Invaluable months were lost, time the Chinese Communist Party used to destroy data and spread disinformation about the virus’s origins. We may never know the truth, but we do know there was a coverup.

Increasing numbers of Americans believe their freedom is under attack, and I agree. . . .

Schools are being pressured to remove books and cancel professors for spreading the “wrong” ideas. These sentiments are all too familiar to me, and to anyone who has survived life in a dictatorship. The only answer is more freedom, more speech, not less.

For the full commentary see:

Garry Kasparov. “‘Woke’ Is a Bad Word for a Real Threat to American Democracy.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021): A19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 17, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.

Young Despairing Chinese Adopt the “Run Philosophy”

(p. B1) “I can’t stand the thought that I will have to die in this place,” said Cheng Xinyu, a 19-year-old writer in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, who is thinking of migrating to foreign countries before the government’s iron fist falls on her.

She can’t imagine having children in China, either.

“I like children, but I don’t dare to have them here because I won’t be able to protect them,” she said, citing concerns like pandemic control workers breaking into apartments to spray disinfectant, killing pets and requiring residents to leave the keys in their apartment door locks.

Ms. Cheng is part of a new trend known as the “run philosophy,” or “runxue,” that preaches running away from China to seek a safer and brighter future. She and millions of others also reposted a video in which a young man pushed back against police officers who warned that his family would be punished for three generations if he refused to go to a quarantine camp. “This will be our last generation,” he told the police.

His response became an online meme that was later censored. Many young people identified with the sentiment, saying they would be reluctant to have children under the increasingly authoritarian government.

. . .

(p. B3) The “run philosophy” and the “last generation” are the rallying cries for many Chinese in their 20s and 30s who despair about their country and their future. They are entering the labor force, getting married and deciding whether to have children in one of the country’s bleakest moments in decades. Censored and politically suppressed, some are considering voting with their feet while others want to protest by not having children.

. . .

Doris Wang, a young professional in Shanghai, said she had never planned to have children in China. Living through the harsh lockdown in the past two months reaffirmed her decision. Children should be playing in nature and with one another, she said, but they’re locked up in apartments, going through rounds of Covid testing, getting yelled at by pandemic control workers and listening to stern announcements from loudspeakers on the street.

“Even adults feel very depressed, desperate and unhealthy, not to mention children,” she said. “They’ll definitely have psychological issues to deal with when they grow up.” She said she planned to migrate to a Western country so she could have a normal life and dignity.

Compounding the frustrations, headlines are full of bad news about jobs. There will be more than 10 million college graduates in China this year, a record. But many businesses are laying off workers or freezing head counts as they try to survive the lockdowns and regulatory crackdowns.

. . .

“When you find that as an individual you have zero ability to fight back the state apparatus, your only way out is to run,” said Ms. Wang, the young professional in Shanghai.

For the full commentary see:

Li Yuan. “The New New World; Young Chinese Feel Suffocated.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 25, 2022): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 24, 2022, and has the title “The New New World;‘The Last Generation’: The Disillusionment of Young Chinese.”

On June 4th, Four-Inch Replicas of the Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy Statue Appeared at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

(p. 10) TAIPEI, Taiwan — For decades, a large candlelight vigil was held in Hong Kong each June 4, to commemorate those killed when Chinese soldiers crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

On Saturday, smaller crowds gathered in Taipei and other cities around the world — this time mourning not just the people slain 33 years ago, but also the fate of Hong Kong, where the smothering of dissent has put an end to the vigil in Victoria Park, the world’s most prominent public memorial to the victims of 1989.

“Now it’s about the two things together — Hong Kong as well as what happened on June 4,” said Francis Tse, a former Hong Kong resident who was one of about 400 people commemorating the anniversary in downtown Sydney, Australia. He and many others carried signs calling for the release of activists imprisoned in Hong Kong.

. . .

On Saturday [June 4, 2022], people who joined commemorations in Taipei, Sydney and London said they had also come to denounce the erasure of political freedoms in Hong Kong, as well as China’s draconian policies in two other regions, Xinjiang and Tibet.

“Now Hong Kong can no longer tell the truth and the real history, we must pass on this history even more in Taiwan,” said Henry Tong, a 41-year-old from Hong Kong who moved to Taiwan last year and attended this year’s vigil in Taipei. “Because of Hong Kong’s prohibition and suppression, it has blossomed everywhere.”

. . .

Over the past year, universities in Hong Kong have removed prominent Tiananmen memorials. In December, the University of Hong Kong took down the “Pillar of Shame,” a 26-foot statue by the Danish artist Jens Galschiot. A depiction of writhing corpses signifying those killed in 1989, it had been at the campus since the late 1990s, becoming a symbol of defiance against the Chinese authorities.

Since its removal, Prague and other cities have hosted replicas of the statue, and a smaller version was unveiled in Taipei on Saturday.

Another statue — modeled after the “Goddess of Democracy” erected by students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — was removed from the Chinese University of Hong Kong campus late last year. In recent days, anonymous activists, determined to commemorate June 4 however they can, have left four-inch replicas of it around the campus.

For the full story see:

John Liu, Chris Buckley, Austin Ramzy, and Isabella Kwai. “Mourning Tiananmen’s Victims, and the Hong Kong That Was In Taipei [sic].” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 5, 2022): 10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 30 [sic], 2022, and has the title “Mourning Tiananmen’s Victims, and the Hong Kong That Was.” The online version says that the print version has the title “In Taipei, Mourning Tiananmen’s Victims, and the Hong Kong That Was”, but my National print version has the title “Mourning Tiananmen’s Victims, and the Hong Kong That Was in Taipai [sic].”)

“Maverick” Chinese Entrepreneur Zhou Hang Dares Criticize Zero Covid Policy

(p. B1) China’s entrepreneur class is grappling with the worst economic slump in decades as the government’s zero Covid policy has shut down cities and kept would-be customers at home. Yet they can’t seem to agree on how loudly they should complain — or even whether they should at all.

. . .

Their approach, the equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, doesn’t make sense to Zhou Hang. Mr. Zhou, a tech entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, has questioned how his peers can pretend it’s business as usual, given the political and economic upheaval. Stop putting up with the ridiculous reality, he urged. It’s time to speak up and seek change.

Mr. Zhou is rare in China’s business community for being openly critical of the government’s zero Covid policy, which has put hundreds of millions of people under some kind of lockdowns in the past few months, costing jobs and revenues. He’s saying what many others are whispering in private but fear to say in public.

“The questions we should ask ourselves are,” he wrote in an article that was censored within an hour of posting (p. B4) but shared widely in other formats, “what caused such widespread negative sentiment across the society? Who should be responsible for this? And how can we change it?”

He said the lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities made it clear that wealth and social status meant little to a government determined to pursue its zero Covid policy. “We’re all nobodies who could be sent to the quarantine camps, and our homes could be broken into,” he wrote. “If we still choose to adapt to and put up with this, all of us will face the same destiny: trapped.”

. . .

Mr. Zhou, 49, is known as a maverick in Chinese business circles. He founded his first business in stereo systems with his brother in the mid-1990s when he was still in college. In 2010, he started Yongche, one of the first ride-hailing companies.

Unlike most Chinese bosses, he didn’t demand that his employees work overtime, and he didn’t like liquor-filled business meals. He turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and refused to participate in subsidy wars because doing so didn’t make economic sense. He ended up losing out to his more aggressive competitor Didi.

He later wrote a best seller about his failure and became a partner at a venture capital firm in Beijing. In April [2022], he was named chairman of the ride-sharing company Caocao, a subsidiary of auto manufacturing giant Geely Auto Group.

A Chinese citizen with his family in Canada, Mr. Zhou said in an interview that in the past many wealthy Chinese people like him would move their families and some of their assets abroad but work in China because there were more opportunities.

Now, some of the top talent are trying to move their businesses out of the country, too. It doesn’t bode well for China’s future, he said.

“Entrepreneurs have good survivor’s instinct,” he said. “Now they’re forced to look beyond China.” He coined a term — “passive globalization” — based on his discussions with other entrepreneurs. “Many of us are starting to take such actions,” he said.

For the full story see:

Li Yuan. “A Solitary Critic on ‘Zero Covid’.” The New York Times (Saturday, June 11, 2022): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 10, 2022 and has the title “A Chinese Entrepreneur Who Says What Others Only Think.”)

Arbitrary Long Lockdown Shows Shanghai “the Precarity of Rights” Under Communist Xi

(p. A5) BEIJING — June [2022], for Shanghai, was supposed to be a time of triumph. After two months of strict lockdown, the authorities had declared the city’s recent coronavirus outbreak under control. Businesses and restaurants were finally reopening. State media trumpeted a return to normalcy, and on the first night of release, people milled in the streets, shouting, “Freedom!”

Julie Geng, a 25-year-old investment analyst in the city, could not bring herself to join. “I don’t think there’s anything worth celebrating,” she said. She had spent part of April confined in a centralized quarantine facility after testing positive and the feeling of powerlessness was still fresh.

“I feel there is no basic guarantee in life, and so much could change overnight,” she said. “It makes me feel very fragile.”

. . .

Some residents are confronting the precarity of rights they once took for granted: to buy food and to expect privacy in their own homes. Some are grieving relationships that fractured under the stresses of lockdown. Many people remain anxious about the weeks they went without pay or whether their businesses will survive.

Hanging over it all is a broader inability to put the ordeal fully behind them, as China still holds to its goal of eliminating the virus. The authorities announced recently that every district in the city would briefly lock down each weekend until the end of July for mass testing.

. . .

The long-term fallout of the containment policies was already becoming clear in the inquiries that Xu Xinyue, a psychologist, received in recent weeks.

When the pandemic began two years ago, said Ms. Xu, who volunteers for a national counseling hotline, many callers were scared of the virus itself. But recent callers from Shanghai had been more concerned with the secondary effects of China’s controls — parents anxious about the consequences of prolonged online schooling, or young professionals worried about paying their mortgages, after the lockdown pummeled Shanghai’s job market.

Others were questioning why they had worked so hard in the first place, having seen how money could not ensure their comfort or safety during lockdown. They were now saving less and spending more on food and other tangible objects that could bring a sense of security, Ms. Xu said.

“Money has lost its original value,” she said. “This has upended the way they always thought, leaving them a bit lost.”

. . .

Anna Qin, an education consultant in her 20s, has started going to the office and the gym again. She walks and bicycles around the city, delighting in feeling her feet on the pavement.

But the fact that such mundane things now feel so special is just a reminder of how much the city was forced to sacrifice.

“We’re glad it’s opening up again, but also there’s no acknowledgment of what we went through,” she said.

“Now it’s closed, now it’s open, and we have no control. And now we’re supposed to be happy.”

For the full story see:

Vivian Wang. “Strict Lockdown Is Over, But Raw Feelings Linger.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 30, 2022): A5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 29, 2022 and has the title “‘Very Fragile’: Shanghai Wrestles With Psychological Scars of Lockdown.”)

Chinese Communists Censor Tiananmen Ice Cream Tank

Tweeted screen capture from a Weibo posting by Li Jiaqi, a posting that was then censored by the Chinese Communists.

(p. A9) HONG KONG—One of China’s biggest online influencers stepped on a political land mine while promoting an ice-cream product on Friday. In the process, he set off a wave of curiosity about the government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters among hordes of fans too young to remember it.

. . .

Mr. Li was promoting Viennetta, a British brand of ice cream made by Unilever, around 9 p.m. on Friday [June 3, 2022]. He and a co-host presented a layered ice cream decorated with round cookies placed along its sides, and topped off with what appeared to be a chocolate stick. Almost immediately, the live show went offline.

To some viewers, the reason for the cutoff was obvious: The dessert sculpture resembled a tank—a sensitive symbol of the Chinese military’s killing of pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, made all the more potent by the iconic image of an anonymous Beijing man facing down a line of them in the wake of the massacre.

. . .

To large numbers of Mr. Li’s other 170 million followers, many of whom were born after 1989 and talk vastly more about shopping than politics, the show’s suspension was puzzling.

. . .

Some of Mr. Li’s fans stumbled upon a 1989 document posted on the central government’s website describing the event as a violent riot that caused the deaths of many soldiers, and posted a link to it online. Many ended their posts with an endorsement of the Communist Party.

Several fans complained that their Weibo accounts were frozen after they posted information that they had dug up about Tiananmen Square.

For the full story, see:

Wenxin Fan. “Ice Cream Sets Off China’s Censors.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 6, 2022): A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 5, 2022, and has the title “Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre.”)

WHO Scientists Say China Should Release Data and Reports on Origin of Covid-19

(p. A9) In its first report, a team of international scientists assembled by the World Health Organization to advise on the origins of the coronavirus said on Thursday [June 9, 2022] that bats likely carried an ancestor of the coronavirus that may have then spilled over into a mammal sold at a wildlife market. But the team said that more Chinese data was needed to study how the virus spread to people, including the possibility that a lab leak played a role.

The team, appointed by the W.H.O. in October as the organization tried to reset its approach to studying the pandemic’s origins, said that Chinese scientists had shared information with them, including from unpublished studies, on two occasions. But gaps in Chinese reports made it difficult to determine when and where the outbreak emerged, the report said.

. . .

Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, praised the latest report for noting the lack of published findings from China’s own origin studies. But she said that its proposals for future pandemic origin studies did not adequately account for investigations into “accidental or deliberate events,” which she said would require expertise outside of public health.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said that the report made clear that mitigating future pandemic threats required considering both animal and laboratory origins.

“Both of these things are sufficiently serious possibilities that they need to be thought about together,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Benjamin Mueller and Carl Zimmer. “Scientists Say More Chinese Data Is Needed to Trace Covid’s Origins.” The New York Times (Friday, June 10, 2022): A9.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 9, 2022, and has the title “Mysteries Linger About Covid’s Origins, W.H.O. Report Says.”)

If a 6-Year-Old Cannot Jump-Rope in Communist China, Her Future Is Bleak

Photo of Art Diamond in first or second grade, finally succeeding at jump-rope. Source: photo by my first and second grade James Monroe School teacher, Miss Helen Kuntz.

My first and second grade teacher was Miss Helen Kuntz. I had a lot of trouble learning how to jump-rope. So when I finally succeeded, Miss Kuntz was so excited that she took my picture, which she mailed me several decades later from a nursing home. If I had been born and raised in Communist China my life would have been much different.

(p. A1) BEIJING—Chinese parents spend dearly on private tutoring for their children to get a jump on national math and language exams, the gateway to advancement and a better life.

Susan Zhang, a 34-year-old mother in China’s capital, is among a smaller group forking out big bucks for jump-rope lessons. She said she couldn’t understand why her 6-year-old daughter Tangtang couldn’t string together two skips in a row after three months of trying. The girl needed professional help.

More than playground prowess was at stake. In 2014, Chinese authorities introduced physical-education require-(p. A10)ments that included a national jump-rope exam for boys and girls from first through sixth grades.

To pass, students must complete minimum numbers of skips a minute, and failure can trip up an otherwise promising academic trajectory. Top officials see the activity as an accessible, low-cost way to help build national sports excellence, a priority of China’s leader Xi Jinping.

For the full story, see:

Jonathan Cheng. “China Exam Draws Jump-Rope Tutors.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021): A1 & A10.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated September 27, 2021, and has the title “In China, Even Jump-Rope is Competitive—So Parents Pay for Lessons.” The online edition says that the title of the print version is “Exam Draws Jump-Rope Tutors,” but my National print version had the title “China Exam Draws Jump-Rope Tutors.”)

Angry and Frustrated Shanghai Citizens Help Each Other Survive During the Lockdown

(p. A1) Four days into a coronavirus lockdown in her Shanghai neighborhood, Ding Tingting began to worry about the old man who lived alone in the apartment below her. She knocked on his door and found that his food supply was dwindling and that he didn’t know how to go online to buy more.

Ms. Ding helped him buy food, but also got to thinking about the many older people who lived alone in her neighborhood. Using the Chinese messaging app WeChat, she and her friends created groups to connect people in need with nearby volunteers who could get them food and medicine.

When a woman’s father-in-law fainted, the network of volunteers found a neighbor with a blood pressure monitor and made sure it was delivered quickly.

“Life cannot be suspended because of the lockdown,” said Ms. Ding, a 25-year-old art curator.

In its relentless effort to stamp out the virus, China has relied on hundreds of thousands of low-level party officials in neighborhood committees to arrange mass testing and coordinate transport to hospitals and isolation facilities. The officials have doled out special passes for the sick to seek medicine and other necessities during lockdown.

In Beijing on Monday [April 25, 2022], the government ordered about three-quarters of the city’s 22 million (p. A6) residents to undergo three mandatory rounds of testing in five days in an effort to get ahead of a new outbreak.

But the recent surge in Shanghai has overwhelmed the city’s 50,000 neighborhood officials, leaving residents struggling to obtain food, medical attention and even pet care. Angry and frustrated, some have taken matters into their own hands, volunteering to help those in need when China’s Communist Party has been unable or unwilling, testing the party’s legitimacy in a time of crisis.

“A claim of the Chinese Communist Party is that only the Communist Party can deliver basic order and livelihood to every person in China,” said Victor Shih, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. For Shanghai residents now trying to get food and other fundamentals, “their confidence in these claims has probably been weakened,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Alexandra Stevenson, Amy Chang Chien and Isabelle Qian. “Shanghai Residents Bend Lockdown Rules to Help One Another.” The New York Times (Wednesday, April 27, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 26, 2022, and has the title “‘I Just Want to Help’: Amid Chaos, Shanghai Residents Band Together.”)