Speaker
Emily Feng
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Over just a couple of decades, China went from not allowing private property ownership to 90% of people owning their own homes.
A Zi quit her job, then secretly pretended to go to work every morning for months — leaving home in business clothes and spending the day in cafes drawing. China's 996 work culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) drove her out, and she's one of tens of millions in the same boat.
Guizhou, China's fourth-poorest province, has 50 of the world's tallest bridges and roughly 13 airports — some with only a few flights per week. It's a monument to prestige projects over people's actual needs.
China's senior leadership has, at various points, been entirely composed of engineers — and engineers build. The problem is when they apply that same literal mindset to society, treating human beings as building materials to be moved and remolded.
Three private jets flew to France — two of them empty — so real estate moguls could play cards. Meanwhile $10,000 watches were handed out as 'tributes of respect.' This was the apex of China's real estate era, and it was hiding a catastrophic crash.
When state planners build for prestige rather than need, you get airports with a few flights a week and bridges no one needs. The bigger question for Guizhou isn't another record-setting bridge — it's whether residents have decent healthcare, cash transfers, and schools.
China's official fertility rate is 1.0 — one child per woman. The UN projects the population will be cut in half by 2100, leaving a country of 700 million with a median age potentially in the early 60s. That's the demographic wall the engineering state has to engineer its way through.
China is substantially state-controlled AND more ferociously capitalist than the US. The phrase 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' simply means the Communist Party decides in real time whether to turn the dial toward markets or toward state control — and that prerogative never leaves the party.
The Chinese Communist Party's actual agenda — emphasis on manufacturing, skepticism of immigration, fierce commitment to traditional gender roles — looks more like Eisenhower's Republican Party than European socialism. It's the US conservative dream wrapped in a communist flag.
The Communist Party is trying to engineer its way out of the fertility crisis by sending neighborhood committees door-to-door to ask young women about their childbearing intentions — and their menstrual cycles. One woman complained the Party has already asked her six times; her own parents asked once.
Buried deep in Xi Jinping's 2017 Party Congress speech was one sentence: houses are for living in, not speculating. That single line kicked off years of tightening regulation that eventually brought Evergrande — carrying hundreds of billions in debt — to its knees.
China spends only about 10% of annual income on redistribution — half what the US spends and a third of Western Europe's 30%. Despite the communist label, there's no property tax to speak of, and the burden falls on regressive consumption taxes. Welcome to socialism with Chinese characteristics.
China's young urban adults grew up expecting the good jobs their parents' sacrifices were supposed to unlock. Now those white-collar jobs have dried up. They're simultaneously seen as spoiled by a generation that shoveled manure, and genuinely miserable — and that combination is socially dangerous.
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