Martin K. Dimitrov

In China, as in all communist regimes, there exist two types of media: one is publicly available and the other is restricted and accessible only to regime insiders who possess the proper clearances. This second type of media, known as neibu 内部 or for ‘internal circulation’, has received less attention from scholars. The puzzle as to whether a Mao-era institution like internal-circulation media has survived into the twenty-first century stems from a theoretical uncertainty about the role of internal publications in an age when so much information is accessible to regime insiders via the Internet and social media. This article provides a theoretical argument about the function of neibu publications in China. It then argues that these media have retained their original functions and are still of central importance as conduits for transmitting sensitive information to Party leaders in the digital age.

What are neibu publications?

In contract to the publicly accessible media, neibu publications are restricted to individuals holding the appropriate rank within the Chinese party-state. The classifications of these media range from neibu 内部 (internal circulation) to mimi 秘密 (confidential), jimi 机密 (secret), and even juemi 绝密(top-secret). Here, neibu is used as a synonym for internal publications at all levels of classification. The general principle is that those materials are available to regime insiders, with the circle of recipients becoming progressively smaller as we move up the ladder of confidentiality. For example, Neibu cankao 内部参考 (Internal Reference) was issued as a secret 机密 serial originally limited to Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee members and provincial CPC Standing Committee members. Top-secret materials have an even narrower distribution list, generally being aimed at CPC Politburo members and provincial Party secretaries.

In terms of type, neibu publications are mirror images of the kinds of media that circulate publicly. They include books on technical matters like policing or military affairs; detailed government reports, yearbooks, and almanacs; documentaries on politically sensitive issues; academic research reports; and, finally, periodic bulletins containing news and analysis on both domestic and international politics. The same individuals write for both neibu and the publicly accessible media, with final decision about which of the two publication streams is the more appropriate outlet resting with the editors at Xinhua, the major news outlets (which all have neibu publications), the major publishing houses, and so on. The range of these sources is truly extensive.

Internal media under Mao

Scholars of Maoist China have an extraordinary resource that allows them to trace systematically the content of internal media: the secret-level classified serial Neibu cankao, which is available at the Universities Service Centre at the Chinese University in Hong Kong in its entirety for the 1949–1964 period. Analysis and detailed coding of the 3,612 issues published between September 1949 and December 1964 reveals that this serial meant for the top leadership contained a rich array of negative news.[1] Readers were apprised of alarming phenomena such as episodes of famine, shortages of goods, and incidences of bureaucratic corruption, theft, and waste as well as ethnic and religious minority unrest. In addition, Neibu cankao tracked various anti-regime and enemy activities, such as the creation of counterrevolutionary organisations or the infiltration of different parts of China by foreign spies. Most frequent were reports on hostile reactions, opinions, and views concerning the Party and its policies, including occasional dispatches on superstitious rumours. This coverage stood in sharp contrast to that in the officially accessible media, such as People’s Daily, which focused on the Party’s achievements and praise.

Other classified publications have survived from the Maoist period include the initially classified Reference News (Cankao xiaoxi 参考消息), which began as neibu but radically expanded its circle of recipients in 1957 and by the late 1970s had become a newspaper that was readily available both on a subscription basis and through newspaper kiosks.^[2] There are also individual issues of serials, bulletins, and government documents at all levels of classification, as well as Xinhua almanacs that discuss internal reference publications. Cumulatively, these sources, which can be accessed at various archives in Hong Kong and in the West allow us to claim that internal media persisted during the darkest chapters of China’s political history such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite arguments put forward by orthodox supporters of the Cultural Revolution that they should cease publication. The reason for their survival is that top leaders found them valuable. As Vice-Premier Chen Yi 陈毅 opined in 1966, the neibu Reference Materials (Cankao ziliao 参考资料) is ‘our daily bread’ and ‘we cannot work without it’.[3] For their part, Mao and Zhou Enlai insisted on reading Reference Materials and Important News of the Day (Meiri yaowen 每日要闻) right before going to bed.[4]

Internal reference materials under Xi

Multiple sources point to the continued importance of neibu publications in the present age. Anecdotally, Chinese academics say that the internal reports they write can lead to bigger bonuses and faster promotions than publications in openly circulating academic journals.[5] Internal reference books and government publications persist, especially in the highly sensitive areas of public security and ethnic affairs.[6] There is also evidence of the screening of classified documentaries on the Soviet collapse to Party cadres.[7] Most importantly, internal reference news bulletins continue to be published. Relevant evidence is provided by the 2014 Jiujiang 九江prefecture Propaganda Department surprise data leak, which revealed the persistence of both central-level and grassroots classified bulletins into the Xi Jinping era. One example from the central level is the Xinhua weekly Public Opinion Observation (party and government edition) 舆情观察(党政版), which contains reports on official Weibo 微博; on social media posts by famous personalities; on the top news items; most frequent keyword searches; most viewed photos, cartoons, and videos; as well as analytical reports on Internet public opinion.^[8] The content of this bulletin suggests that this is the primary way in which the leadership understands the Chinese Internet and social media.

At the grassroots level, Xinhua prepares bulletins on Internet public opinion that are generated through the Xinhua public opinion management system舆情管理系统, consisting of over 700 popular print media from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as over 300 major websites and over 300 discussion forums. This system enables keyword searches that can be used to produce reports about public opinion expressed in different localities in China. For example, public opinion about Jiujiang prefecture in one week in October 2014 consisted of 159 items from the traditional print media; 908 items from the online media; and 509 items from discussion forums.^[9] Once identified, these items can be scored in terms of their tone (positive, neutral, negative), with negative public opinion highlighted for additional attention. In general, over the last decade there has been a proliferation of internal reporting tailored for cadres at various levels of the political system.[10]

Do these reports matter? A cliché about communist regimes is that leaders ignore the intelligence they receive.^[11] One feature of the Chinese internal reporting system allows us to test this assumption: leaders have the option to discount the information, to read it, or to read it and to issue instructions (pishi 批示). We have evidence that in 2005 central leading cadres中央领导issued instructions on 1,460 internal reference reports prepared by the Xinhua News Agency; by 2011, the number of reports prompting instructions by the top leadership had risen more than threefold to 4,557.^[12] Since then, attention to these documents has grown further.[13] This rapid increase attests both to the value that leaders attach to internal reporting and to the frequency with which these reports inform policy decisions: according to the internal rules of the Chinese bureaucracy, a report that has received a pishi automatically acquires the status of a policy document.^[14] In sum, internal journalistic reporting remains indispensable to decision makers in the age of social media. These reports allow leaders to react to online and offline public opinion crises quickly and to thus fulfil the paramount goal of Stability Maintenance 维稳.

Why neibu publications still matter

In the eyes of the party, the most important distinction between internal media and publicly available media is the function they serve. Internal periodicals have to contain factual information 信息, while publicly available outlets carry appropriate news 新闻, opinions, and most importantly, propaganda messaging.[15] Xi Jinping for example, called for the public media to ‘correctly guide public opinion’ 正确舆论导向 by ‘emphasising positive publicity’ 正面宣传为主.^[16]

This distinction goes back many decades. During the Mao period, when the People’s Daily avoided reporting on sensitive topics like famine or popular criticism of the regime, Xinhua instructed journalists writing for internal publications to collect information on important events and provide objective, factual reporting not suitable for publicly accessible media. Specifically, this included the political attitudes expressed by ordinary people of different walks of life and their opinions about important domestic and international events. In addition, internal media contributors were expected to track people’s opinions about life and work problems and monitor their views about the leading party and government organs. Finally, internal media had to cover natural disasters and ‘counterrevolutionary’ activities. In sum, such publications were entrusted with a very broad mandate of reporting on negative developments, while the publicly available media carried propagandistic and politically vetted content.^[17]

Academic studies of internal publications have focused on the Mao period.^[18] Given the difficulty of accessing a substantial body of such publications, most research is based on relatively small samples. Nevertheless, it’s clear that under Mao, reporting on domestic news was an important focus of internal media, which covered a wide spectrum of issues from popular reactions to the death of Stalin to the circulation of rumours and the incidence of riots.^[19] Internal bulletins served as a key source of information for the leadership during the Mao period and potentially up until the 1989 pro-democracy protest movement.^[20]

In the post-1989 period, foreign scholarship has centred on investigative reporting in the publicly available print media, including commercialised media, and on citizen journalism in social media.^[21] The implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption is that internal journalistic reporting has either become extinct or has greatly receded in importance due to the rise of useful reporting in commercial media, where investigative journalism of the sort that reveals public attitudes and concerns helps make publications competitive.^[22]

And yet, a leaked 2011 directive on writing internal reports for the party and the government reveals the distinct requirements for internal information that validate the persistence of internal publications into the digital age.^[23] Because internal information reports are supposed to help leaders reach decisions, they need to be presented in an objective and clear writing style. By contrast, publicly available news and reports serve multiple functions: to entertain, propagandise, educate, and guide public opinion and so may use literary devices like metaphors and analogies. This document also specifies the kinds of information (regarding disasters, epidemics, and unexpected incidents), whose casual release to the public could have a negative impact on social stability; such information can appear in the public media with prior approval from the senior leader at the relevant level.^[24]

One theory is that investigate journalism thrived precisely because the regime needed more information.[25] However, given that the regime has abundant sources of information that are not publicly disseminated, investigative reporting may better serve other regime goals such as appearing accountable.²⁶

In July 2024 Beijing News 新京报 published a front-page report on tankers being consecutively used to transport coal-to-liquid fuels 煤制油 and edible oils 食用油 without being cleaned in between.[26] Widely hailed as ‘investigative journalism’,[27] the report acknowledges that this practice is a well-known ‘open secret’ 公开的秘密.[28] What was the purpose of this report? By the end of August 2024, two truck drivers had been arrested and three companies penalised. Most important were the draft regulations laid down in August 2024 by the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration, which stipulated that containers used for transporting non-edible oils should not be used for cooking oils.[29] Thus, instead of investigative reporting, we most likely have a strategically placed report that aimed to portray the government as responsive and accountable to citizen concerns. Whenever the relevant neibu documents become available, we can check on when a report on unclean cooking oil first emerged in the internal media. This author’s strong suspicion is that this happened months and perhaps even years prior to the Beijing News publication.

In sum, internal publications continue to deliver negative information to the leadership in the Xi era, apprising it of popular dissatisfaction.

[1] Martin K. Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 132–135.

[2] Xinhua News Agency, Chronicle of Important Events at the Xinhua News Agency, 1950-1976,新华社大事记, 1950-1976, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2002, p. 41; Xinhua News Agency, Cankao xiaoxi: Commemorative Booklet for the 55^th Anniversary of Its Creation (1931-1986) and the 30^th Anniversary of the Expansion of Its Circulation (1957-1987) 参考消息–创办五十五周年(1931-1986)扩大发行三十周年(1957-1987)纪念册, Hefei: Anhui Xinhua Yinshuachang, 1987.

[3] Xinhua News Agency, Chronicle of Important Events at the Xinhua News Agency, 1950-1976新华社大事记, 1950-1976, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2002, p. 88.

[4] Ibid., p. 112.

[5] Author’s conversations with academics in China, 2023–2024.

[6] Third Department of the Ministry of Public Security, Compendium of PRC Household Registration Regulations, 1950–2014 中华人民共和国户口管理资料汇编, 1950–2014, Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin Gong’an Daxue Chubanshe, 2015; Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Local Gazetteer Editing Committee, Xinjiang Gazetteer, 1986–2005, vol. 7: Politics 新疆通志 1986–2005, 第七卷:政治, Beijing: Fangzhi Chubanshe, 2022.

[7] Author’s conversations with academics in China, 2023–2024.

[8] Public Opinion Observation (party and government edition)  舆情观察(党政版), Nr. 16 (17 October 2014).

[9] Jiujiang Public Opinion Assessment Weekly 九江市舆情监测周报, Nr. 40 (6 October–10 October 2014).

[10] Tao Wu and Bixiao He, ‘Intelligence for Sale: The “Party-Public Sentiment, Inc.” and Stability Maintenance in China’, Problems of Post-Communism 67:2 (2020), 129–140.

[11] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, New York: Walker & Co., 2010.

[12] Calculated from Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2006 新华社年鉴2006, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2007, p.198 and Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2011新华社年鉴2011, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2012, p. 259.

[13] Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2016 新华社年鉴2016, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2017.

[14] Wen-Hsuan Tsai, ‘A Unique Pattern of Policymaking in China’s Authoritarian System: The CCP’s Neican/Pishi Model’, Asian Survey 55:6 (November/December 2015), 1093-1115.

[15] Martin K. Dimitrov, ‘The Political Logic of Media Control in China’, Problems of Post-Communism 64: 3–4 (2017), 121–127.

[16] David Bandurski, ‘Under Xi, the Media has Turned from a ‘Mouthpiece of the Masses’ to the Party’s Parrot’, Hong Kong Free Press, 21 June 2016, online at https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/06/21/under-xi-the-media-has-turned-from-a-mouthpiece-of-masses-to-the-partys-parrot/

[17] ‘Central Committee Regulation for Xinhua Journalists Writing Internal Reference Materials’ 中共中央关于新华社记者采写内部参考资料的规定, July 1953.

[18] Michael Schoenhals, ‘Elite Information in China’, Problems of Communism 34 (September-October 1985), 65–71; Jennifer Grant, ‘Internal Reporting by Investigative Journalists in China and Its Influence on Government Policy’, International Communication Gazette 41 (1988), 53–65; Huai Yan and Suisheng Zhao, ‘Notes on China’s Confidential Documents’, Journal of Contemporary China 2:4 (1993), 75–92.

[19] For a piece based on the systematic analysis of 30 reports published in Neibu cankao in March 1953, see Hua-yu Li, ‘Reactions of Chinese Citizen to the Death of Stalin: Internal Communist Party Reports’, Journal of Cold War Studies 11:2 (Spring 2009), 70–88. On rumours and superstitions in Neibu cankao, see S. A. Smith, ‘Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of “Superstitious” Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961-1965’, American Historical Review 111:2 (2006), 405-427. For an overview of sensitive issues covered in Neibu cankao, see Dimitrov 2017.

[20] Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 152–157; Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link, and Orville Schell, comps., The Tiananmen Papers, New York: Pacific Affairs, 2002; Daniel Leese, ‘The CCP Information Order in the Early People’s Republic of China: The Case of Xuanjiao Dongtai’, Modern China 49:2 (2023), 135–158.

[21] Zhou Yuezhi, ‘Watchdogs on Party Leashes? Contexts and Implications of Investigative Journalism in Post-Deng China’, Journalism Studies 1:4 (2000), 577–597; David Bandurski and Martin Hala, eds., Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases of Chinese Watchdog Journalism, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010; Jingrong Tong, Investigative Journalism in China: Journalism, Power, and Society, London: Continuum, 2011; Marina Svensson, Elin Saether, and Zhi’an Zhang, eds., Chinese Investigative Journalists’ Dreams: Autonomy, Agency, and Voice, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014; Jingrong Tong, Investigative Journalism, Environmental Problems, and Modernization in China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Haiyan Wang, The Transformation of Investigative Journalism in China: From Journalists to Activists, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016; Jonathan Hassid, China’s Unruly Journalists: How Committed Professionals Are Changing the People’s Republic, New York: Routledge, 2016; Maria Repnikova, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017; Rongbin Han, Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, esp. p. 77–100.

[22] Peter Lorentzen, ‘China’s Strategic Censorship’, American Journal of Political Science 58:2 (April 2014), 402–414; Daniela Stockmann, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013; Xin Xin, How the Market Is Changing China’s News: The Case of the Xinhua News Agency, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012; Susan L. Shirk, ed., Changing Media, Changing China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; and Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. For an exception to this line of thinking, see Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information.

[23] ‘Some Pointers on Writing Reports for Party and Government’ 党政信息写工作的几点体会, online at http://www.zk168.com/fanwen/fanwenxinde_274744

[24] Ibid.

[25] Lorentzen, ‘China’s Strategic Censorship’.

[26] Dimitrov 2017; Haiyan Wang, ‘A Dog That No Longer Barks: Role Performance of Investigative Journalism in China in the Digital Age’, Journalism Practice 18 (2024), 2240–2257.

[27] Han Futao (韩福涛), ‘An Investigation of Tanker Truck Transport Chaos in Unloading Coal Oil and Loading Edible Oil’ 罐车运输乱象调查卸完煤制油又装食用油, Beijing News, 2 July 2024, online at https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1719878490168127.html

[28] ‘A Rare Exposé’, China Media Project, 10 July 2024, online at https://chinamediaproject.org/2024/07/10/rare-front-page-report/#:~:text=Reporters%2C%20for%20example%2C%20trailed%20one,of%20the%20tank%20in%20between.

[29] https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1719878490168127.html

[30] ‘Chinese Cooking Oil Scandal Prompts New Safety Rule for Transporting Products’, South China Morning Post, 30 August 2024, online at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3276586/chinese-cooking-oil-scandal-prompts-new-safety-rules-transporting-products

The post Eyes Only: How China’s Party Leaders Get Their Information appeared first on The China Story.

The photo showed a young Chinese couple in a park in Adelaide, with a caption saying that they were celebrating their six-month anniversary. Alice immediately recognised the man in the photo as the partner of a friend of hers who she had messaged earlier that day. She was disgusted by the discovery of his two-timing, but impressed by the power of Xiaohongshu’s algorithm.

Alice didn’t follow her friend or her partner on Xiaohongshu, but despite that and her being 729 kilometres away from Adelaide, Xiaohongshu’s powerful combined geographical and personalised algorithm had shown her that photo.

Background and expansion

Launched in 2013 in Shanghai by Stanford graduate Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu, Xiaohongshu 小红书 – also known as ‘Red’ or ‘The Little Red Book’ – has become the fastest growing social platform in China by 2023.^[1] Users share stories and photos from daily life, exchange life hacks and post reviews ranging from new lipsticks to interior design.^[2] Similar to Instagram, Xiaohongshu prioritises posts that contain photos and videos, and divides them into three main feeds for users: ‘Follow’, where users can view posts from people they choose to follow; ‘Explore’, where users can access algorithm-personalised posts by choosing their favourite content categories, from manicures to career development; and ‘Nearby’, where the app recommends content produced in the same geographical area as the user.

When it was first launched, Xiaohongshu was designed as an e-commerce platform providing overseas travel and shopping information for Chinese tourists abroad, offering them user-generated recommendations on where to eat, shop or stay and what to buy overseas. It was also the time when the phenomena of daigou 代购, shoppers buying sought-after goods overseas on behalf of consumers in China, caught global attention. As daigou relied on social media to advertise the products, it contributed to China’s first transnational e-commerce boom, with the sector recording 2.7 trillion RMB ($573 billion AUD) in 2014.^[3] The profits of the e-commerce boom not only prompted then Premier Li Keqiang to announce new economic policies to promote the growth of cross-border e-commerce, but also inspired Xiaohongshu to launch its own online store in 2014 selling overseas products recommended by its users.^[4]

With the increasing traffic to the app and growing diversity of content, Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce feature extended to products available in mainland China. The app combines the user-generated posts with e-commerce by allowing each post to embed a shopping link to the products. Users describe Xiaohongshu’s e-commerce model as ‘planting seeds’ 种草: the user-generated reviews plant the seed of desire for the items. This differentiates the platform from traditional e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and newer ones such as TEMU, which still follow the Amazon-like structure that prioritises item search, rather than customer reviews.^[5]

Specifically, Xiaohongshu encourages users to produce anecdotal, visual and first-person reviews that directly address other users. These requirements constitute what marketing professionals call the Xiaohongshu format 小红书文案, which feature of a condensed, click-bait headline, a strong first-person anecdote, practical tips and suggestions, and address other users as ‘families’ 家人们, ‘sisters’ 姐妹们, ‘fairies’ 仙女们 and ‘little sweet potatoes’ 红薯们 (hongshu men, a pun on the name red book, hongshu 红书) which is the way Xiaohongshu fans describe themselves. With the development of artificial intelligence in recent years, Chat-GPT style AI tools have been developed to help users and marketing professionals write the kind of post favoured by Xiaohongshu’s algorithm.^[6] For Instance, to generate a negative review of a restaurant with unreasonably high prices and poor service, a Xiaohongshu-tailored AI would generate a post as below^[7]:

Title: NEVER EVER eat at this restaurant!

Today I want to share with you all my experience at a shady restaurant: xxx restaurant. Firstly, the prices were quite high, the food just so-so, and not worth the price. Secondly, the staff’s attitudes were bad – while we ordered, the waiter looked impatient, which made us feel very uncomfortable. Lastly, the dining environment was no good either, and it made you lose your appetite. In summary, never ever eat in this restaurant, I really don’t recommend it! #NotRecommend #BadReview #HighPrice

According to a senior Xiaohongshu director, the philosophy behind promoting such an anecdotal style of reviews is to encourage users to ‘genuinely share’ 真诚分享 their experiences: ‘When we first began the platform for offering reviews of transnational shopping, we aimed to present authentic views from real people on real items, and these reviews could be shown to another person with similar demands. When the person read these reviews, they’d find them useful,’ said ‘Monkey King’, the director of the CEO office. (As part of its corporate culture, all staff in Xiaohongshu address each other using nicknames – the CEO himself is known as Seiya, from the Japanese manga Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac).^[8]

However, the rise of AI generated content and ‘soft advertising’ on the platform raise doubts on the supposed authenticity of the reviews. Similar to other video sharing platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, Xiaohongshu has become a new platform for online influencers who collaborate with brands to produce advertisements disguised as authentic product reviews.

Some accounts will embed a link that directs customers to shops on Xiaohongshu, so that shoppers don’t need to quit the platform to complete the purchase. Among the brands that maintain accounts on Xiaohongshu are Dior and Chanel. In the first quarter of 2024, Xiaohongshu recorded over US$1 billion sales, with a net profit of $200 million.^[9] The platform records around 300 million active users per month and has been listed as most popular mobile app among Chinese people under thirty along with second-hand selling platform Xianyu 咸鱼 (No. 2) and video platform bilibili 哔哩哔哩 (No.3).^[10] But as the platform continues to grow, issues embedded in its technical and algorithmic structure have emerged, including social and political dilemmas that could worry the Party and government.

A feminist platform?

Since its founding, Xiaohongshu has accumulated a large base of young female users. According to data from a Fujian-based social marketing company, around 70 percent of Xiaohongshu’s users are young women, with 85 percent of them born after 1996 (‘Gen Z’) and half of them from China’s first and second-tier cities.^[11] The preponderance of women has created a space for women to interact and discuss gender-related topics from skincare routines to menstrual shaming.^[12] Notably, compared to other social media platforms such as Weibo, users of Xiaohongshu are more likely to follow and adopt recommendations of other users due to its nature as a review-sharing platform.^[13] Xiaohongshu’s operations team knows that growing their user community gives them more opportunities to monetise user-generated content. Taiwanese software engineer Nick who worked for Xiaohongshu in 2017 has told Bailingguo News – one of the top three podcasts in Taiwan – that during his time at the company, Xiaohongshu had around 200 staff, over half of whom were women.^[14] The majority of the team of operation engineers responsible for content presentation were women as well. According to him, Xiaohongshu would collaborate with cosmetic brands to offer training about makeup products to male engineers responsible for the algorithm so they could learn about trends. ‘It’s very useful. It helps you understand what’s the difference between lipsticks and lip glosses,’ he told Bailinguo News.^[15]

With users’ heavy focus on consumer aesthetics, Xiaohongshu has sparked debates over consumerism and gender stereotypes, including that which promotes the ‘pale, young and slim’ 白幼瘦 obsession among young women. In 2020 and 2021, a combination of user-directed recommendations and brand-driven promotion made the American fast-fashion brand Brandy Melville a symbol of youth, charisma and fashion. Xiaohongshu users coined the term ‘BM style’ based on the brand’s one-size-fits-all (so long as ‘all’ are slim) philosophy and posted photos and videos of themselves in Brandy Melville clothing. ‘BM style’ became the subject of a popular user-driven discussion on young women’s appearance, with many discussing ‘appearance anxiety’ 容貌焦虑 related to the promotion of the ‘pale, young and slim look’, leading to the hashtag ‘RejectAppearanceAnxiety’ 拒绝容貌焦虑’ on the platform in 2022. The discussion eventually inspired a new popular online buzzword, ‘beauty conscription’ 服美役, that likened the social pressures and gender stereotypes forcing young Chinese women to apply makeup, dress up and keep fit (slim) to military conscription.^[16] Today, the promotion of ‘pale, young and slim’ aesthetics co-exists on Xiaohongshu alongside discussions of appearance anxiety. The hashtag #AppearanceAnxiety, where people criticise the overemphasis on appearance has received 2.8 billion views. To put this in perspective, the hashtag #FatLoss 减脂  – for sharing tips on losing weight and building and maintaining a fit and thin figure – has received almost 13.4 billion views.

Still, the disproportionate number of female users on Xiaohongshu has fostered the assertion of individual identities and feminist awareness where users discuss important topics of women’s health that are still taboo in China’s mainstream society, ranging from menstruation and postpartum depression to motherhood. It creates a community where women offer peer support and tips to each other through first-person narrated posts with visual elements. For instance, the hashtag #menstruation had 1.5 billion views by end of 2024. Women used it to discuss the pros and cons of menstrual products from pads to menstrual cups, share their reviews of different hygienic brands and tell stories related to menstrual cramps.  You can find critiques of the social stigma around periods and explainers for women’s health issues such as the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer. In November 2024, the conversation around women’s menstruation sparked a public outrage against China’s major sanitary pad producers, including over their misleading advertising about the dimensions of their pads.^[17]

Such discussions are partly fuelled by the sanitary product industry itself. Many posts looked like an explainer of menstrual cycles with tag lines such as ‘girls must read’ or ‘it’s 2024, time to normalise discussions about periods’, yet they are in fact product placements, or posts from sanitary product brands themselves. There are questions about whether consumeristic ‘self-care’ rhetoric is truly feminist, not only on Xiaohongshu but also on Douyin other social media platforms (and which echo similar questions raised by and posed on foreign platforms such as Instagram). However, such public discussion of subjects like menstruation has encouraged women to speak openly about other controversial topics such as the desirability of child-free marriage^[18], violence against women, and reproductive strategies such as egg-freezing for young women who want to delay motherhood.^[19]

Besides engaging in topic-specific discussions, many women on Xiaohongshu will post about their daily routines, career progress and travel, often through well-edited and filtered videos. While some of them spark controversies and criticism for worshipping materialism and over-glamourising middle-class lifestyles in China’s first-tier cities, it can be argued that the content reflects the concerns of many Chinese Gen Z women. The discussions show that marriages and families are not a priority for this demographic group, which prefers to define success in terms of personal growth, mental health and career. An example is the series of ‘Living Alone 独居’ vlogs where Xiaohongshu users show off their single lifestyles: travelling alone, engaging in their nightly routines after work.^[20] Some have become influencers as their videos go viral – even as questions arise about whether some are just product placements disguised as lifestyle. The connectivity of social media platforms means that the ‘Living Alone’ series videos are also widely available and popular on platforms such as Douyin. Product placements or not, the key message of these videos remains that women can also live happily without being married or having children, and this has had a significant social impact in itself.^[21]

Is Xiaohongshu the next tool for Beijing’s foreign influence?

The platform has never officially acknowledged whether the name Xiaohongshu bear any reference to the ‘The Little Red Book’, the nickname given to Quotations from Chairman Mao published in the 1960s and was ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution. And while it was founded for commerce, not political ends, there are concerns that Xiaohongshu will follow TikTok – a short video app that originated from China – and be manipulated to serve Beijing’s political interests abroad.

In 2022 in Taiwan, where the government is combating a multi-front mis- and disinformation assault from China, Tsai Ing-wen’s government banned public servants from downloading Xiaohongshu on government devices.^[22] But Xiaohongshu is popular with Taiwanese youth who use it as a reliable search engine for beauty and lifestyle information. The increased popularity of Chinese drama and entertainment shows among Taiwanese young people also drives downloads for access to updates and fan-made content.^[23] While politics isn’t a major topic of discussion on Xiaohongshu, a Taiwan-based Xiaohongshu user told Radio Free Asia’s Wainao – a longform news outlet for the Gen Z Chinese diaspora – they did occasionally receive recommended posts containing mainland nationalist content, including one encouraging them to read the People’s Daily.^[24]

In the United States and Australia, Xiaohongshu is widely used by Chinese students studying at universities and young first-generation migrants, who find it useful for locating Chinese restaurants, Asian grocery stores and Chinese-speaking trade services as well as researching immigration policies and sharing their immigration experiences.^[25] In Australia, Xiaohongshu attracts almost 700,000 users^[26], including Chinese Australian citizens and temporary residents such as international students.^[27] In 2021, I interviewed three Australians who are on Xiaohongshu.^[28] Sebastian, who first came across Xiaohongshu through his Chinese partner, treated the platform like a ‘Chinese Instagram’ where he posted his daily outfits in exchange for hundreds of likes – often much more than on his Instagram where he shares the same content. Julie, an Anglo Australian who began studying Chinese at 11 years old, was a part-time influencer collaborating with an Australian marketing company to promote Australian products to Chinese audiences. Michael, a corporate worker in Melbourne who speaks Chinese and married a Chinese international student, talks about his upbringing as a second-generation Chinese Australian on Xiaohongshu. He also shares his personal tips for new migrants and international students on job hunting and ‘fitting in’. Xiaohongshu has become a new platform for Australian politicians to engage with the Chinese Australian electorate. According to an ABC News report in November 2024, twenty politicians, ranging from federal members to local councillors, use the app.^[29]

Since November 2023, Xiaohongshu has been gaining attention from teenagers outside China, after a video of a male blogger who learned makeup techniques from Xiaohongshu users went viral on TikTok. They joined Xiahohongshu to participate in the new Chinese social media trend of ‘Open to blunt advice’ 听劝 which encourages people to take advice from strangers on the internet. On the platform, they asked for make-up advices and suggestions on improving their appearances.^[30] In January 2025, ahead of the possible TikTok ban in the United States, many TikTok users rushed to Xiaohongshu as ‘TikTok refugees’ as they considered Xiaohongshu to share similar functions as TikTok.^[31]

However, unlike TikTok, Xiaohongshu’s global influence remains limited. Just as Tencent WeChat was the international version of Weixin to mitigate data and social media regulations from China on users outside the country, Xiaohongshu also launched an international version for overseas users, which it calls REDNote.^[32] According to the descriptions of Xiaohongshu and REDNote on the Apple Store, the two apps take different approaches to data from users’ contacts. Xiaohongshu users could find their data from contacts could be collected and linked to their identities^[33], while REDNote users may still find the data being collected by the app, but the data would not link to their identities.^[34] While Xiaohongshu has its own X account and YouTube channel to promote the platform in English, neither have been updated since 2022.

Nevertheless, utility of Xiaohongshu as a travel guide for Chinese tourists has prompted the tourism offices of foreign governments to launch their official accounts on Xiaohongshu in hopes of boosting visitor numbers from China. In August 2024, Australia’s Northern Territory, which experienced a 10.5 per cent drop of domestic tourists in 2023 due to Australia’s ongoing cost of living crisis, tense competition against international markets and other factors, launched its Xiaohongshu account to promote destinations such as Uluru, attempting to attract tourists from China.^[35]

Bumps in the road

Despite its lifestyle focus, Xiaohongshu is exposed to political risks inside and outside China. It is subject to China’s toughening censorship regime and has been found to censor keywords relating, for example, to the 1989 Tiananmen protests and Xi Jinping.^[36] Internationally, despite being one of the most popular platforms Chinese travellers turn to for overseas trip advice, Xiaohongshu does not yet have an overseas branch, although it is planning to open an office in Hong Kong.^[37] This could partly be due to the fact that Xiaohongshu struggled to make a profit until 2023, almost a decade after it was first launched.^[38]

The platform has drawn attention from business analysts for inefficiently monetising its huge amount of content and large community of users to boost its e-commerce business, which is the foundation of its business model. Its existing e-commerce feature does not have a clear brand compared with TEMU’s low pricing and Taobao’s convenience, for example.^[39] China’s tightening control of private companies going public overseas may also have slowed Xiaohongshu’s international expansion.^[40] However, as the platform recorded its first profits and caught the attention of venture capital investors^[41], it is possible that Xiaohongshu will relaunch overseas, although the company has denied that it would go public in Hong Kong or the United States.^[42]

The lack of a corporate presence overseas has posed questions such as data safety for overseas users. In Australia, there have also been concerns about misinformation on Xiaohongshu regarding Australian elections and referenda, with media academics calling for the Australian government to develop policy regarding the regulation of such platforms.^[43] There are a number of issues the platform will have to address if it wants to follow WeChat and TikTok overseas.

The Xiaohongshu bubble

To some extent, Xiaohongshu serves as a kind of pop culture survey, capturing and presenting the latest social trends and phenomena in contemporary China through vivid and relatable stories from everyday life. For instance, the intensive work environment and Chinese economic slowdown sparked a new trend on Xiaohongshu in June with users posting about life after quitting their jobs.^[44] In these posts, users share photos of themselves walking out of offices, packing their luggage and moving back to their hometowns, and beginning afresh by farming, travelling or pursuing other personal goals. However, Xiaohongshu has also caught attention from the Cyberspace Administration Office of China for failing to regulate the increasing number of posts that celebrate an over-materialist lifestyle.^[45] Since 2021, as part of the China’s mass campaign for internet regulation, Operation Qinglang 清朗行动, Xiaohongshu have followed instructions from the Cyberspace Administration Office of China and suspended accounts and removed social media posts that involve ‘showing off money and worshiping wealth’ 拜金炫富.^[46] Many people simply find other ways to project images of success on Xiaohongshu: Chinese state media reported in November 2024 that a growing number of users on Xiaohongshu post doctored photos of themselves making speeches at the United National Assembly.^[47] In August 2019, following reports by several Chinese media that Xiaohongshu failed to regulate accounts that sell pirate luxury-brand items on its e-commerce platforms, and advertising posts for tobaccoes, China’s cyberspace authorities instructed Xiaohongshu to rectify its content, and the app was removed from all mobile app stores for a month^[48].

Xiaohongshu is also heavily invested in an algorithm designed to fragment its users into groups based on their interests and lifestyles. When a new user joins Xiaohongshu, the platform automatically activates its personalisation algorithm. In its algorithm’s guidelines, Xiaohongshu states that it tracks information on the users’ devices, but it does not specify what type of information it will track. It also states that it will track geolocation, view history and all activities on the app so that the algorithm can recommend posts and videos of interest to them. It then reacts to likes by creating a bubble that pushes more and more similar content into their feeds. Commercially, this helps users, whose tastes are thus validated, develop a strong sense of community, which increases their loyalty toward the platform, and both Xiaohongshu and brands can easily make money from users in such bubbles. But it also restricts the picture of modern China and overseas Chinese communities for users to that reflected in their bubbles, including notions of wealth distribution and inequality, especially as the app itself is heavily biased towards the middle-classes. Its invasive yet opaque access to users’ personal information on phones have also sparked concerns on privacy. For Alice, who discovered the partner of her friend cheating on her in Adelaide while she was using the app in Melbourne, the incident did not just alert her to the platform’s powerful algorithms, but also how Xiaohongshu could have unintended effects on Chinese people’s daily lives wherever they live.

*Alice prefers using a pseudonym to protect her identity

Notes

^[1] Newrank, ‘2023 New Media Content Ecosystem Data Report’, 2023新媒体内容生态数据报告, Newrank.cn, 5 March 2024, online at: https://edit.newrank.cn/detail.html?uuid=CD1017CC7A7C05F817C31DCA2F049C32

^[2] Eleanor Olcott, ‘Chinese Social Media Sensation Xiaohongshu Win Major foreign VC Backing’, Financial Times, 11 July 2024, online at:  https://www.ft.com/content/2d5f515f-d341-41c8-ace5-16a16cb33e35

^[3] Qu Yiping, ‘How does Cross-border e-commerce platform Work’, 跨界电商究竟怎么跨, People.cn, 1 October 2015, online at: http://paper.people.com.cn/rmzk/html/2015-10/01/content_1638473.htm

^[4] People Daily, ‘Li Keqiang hosted State Council Executive Meeting’, 李克强主持召开国务院常务会议,http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2015/0611/c1024-27135868.html

^[5]  Wing Kuang, ‘TEMU’s business model could only work in China. But they’re racing to replace Amazon in the global market’, ABC Online, 29 August 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-29/temu-may-save-china-status-as-world-factory-amid-deflation/102724900

^[6] She Xiaochen, ‘AI post is dominating Xiaohongshu’, AI文案正在攻占小红书, Jiemian news, 17 July 2024, online at: https://www.stcn.com/article/detail/1261073.html

^[7] Tai Feng, ‘Xiaohongshu Generator-ChatGPT’, 小红书生成器-ChatGPT, online at: https://ai.xiaohongshu.live/

^[8]Zan Kuang Zhanyu,’In-depth Interview: Behind the Scene of Xiaohongshu’, 深度访谈：想不到你是这样的小红书, bilibili, 29 March 2021, online at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1DK4y1T7na/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=9fdd674b2b019d60d5f6a64069e21ad3

^[9] Bloomberg News staff, ‘China’s Instagram-style Xiaohongshu crosses $1 billion in profit’, Bloomberg, 12 December 2024, online at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/china-s-instagram-style-xiaohongshu-crosses-1-billion-in-profit

^[10] QuestMobile, ‘QuestMobile Report: Xianyu, Xiaohongshu and bilibili top ranking of young people’s most favourite apps’, QuestMobile报告：咸鱼与小红书、B站并列高值年轻人喜爱三大APP, 1 July 2024, online at: http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/202407/01/t20240701_39055609.shtml

^[11] Qiangua, ‘QIangua data: Xiaohongshu’, 千瓜数据-小红书数据分析平台,Qiangua Data, online at: https://www.qian-gua.com/article/index/1/1.html

^[12] Hanzhe Chi, Renhao Liu and Jingye Pan, ‘Users’ behaviour under the uneven gender ratio of social media platforms: taking Hupu and Xiaohongshu as examples’, SHS Web of Conferences, vol. 50, no. 2 (2022): 1-5.

^[13] Zhuoli Wang, Wei-jue Huang and Bingjie Liu-Lastres, ‘Impact of user-generated travel posts on travel decisions: A comparative study on Weibo and Xiaohongshu’, Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, vol. 3, no. 2 (2022): 1-11.

^[14] Nick didn’t reveal his last name in the show.

^[15] Bailinguo News, ‘The KK Show – 216 Xiaohongshu Algorithm Engineer Nick’, The KK Show – 216 小紅書算法工程師Nick, YouTube, 26 September 2023, online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN07i8Puqzs

^[16] Huiyan Chen, What’s behind Chinese Women’s ‘Beauty Duty’ Backlash?’, Jing Daily, 19 October 2022, online at: https://jingdaily.com/posts/beauty-duty-womens-rights-china

^[17] Koh Ewe, ‘Chinese companies apologise for ‘shrunken’ sanitary pads’, BBC News, 28 November 2024, online at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev9ry341dyo

^[18] Jingshen Ge and Weiqi Tian, ‘Reimagining maternity: a multimodal analysis on the identity construction amongst Chinese ‘Married, child-free’ women in Xiaohongshu’, Social Semiotics, (2024): 1-12.

^[19] Jingshen Ge and Weiqi Tian, ‘Preserving choice: weaving femininity and autonomy through egg freezing discourse on Xiaohongshu’, Critical Discourse Studies (2024): 1-22.

^[20]Jia Guo, ‘Living-alone’ Wanghong: Women’s singleness as a Wanghong genre and the configuration of Chinese postfeminist wanghong culture’, Global Media and China, (2024).

^[21]Jia Guo, ‘Living-alone’ Wanghong: Women’s singleness as a Wanghong genre and the configuration of Chinese postfeminist wanghong culture’, Global Media and China, (2024).

^[22] Liang Jinghong, Chen Yuzhen and Xu Bosong, ‘Taiwanese teenagers on Douyin and Xiaohongshu: when national identity co-exists with Chinese social media trends’, 抖音、小紅書上的台灣青少年：當本土認同與中國社群媒體熱潮並行,Initium Media, 12 January 2023, online at: https://theinitium.com/article/20230113-taiwan-concerns-teens-chineseapps

^[23] Liang Jinghong, Chen Yuzhen and Xu Bosong, ‘Taiwanese teenagers on Douyin and Xiaohongshu: when national identity co-exists with Chinese social media trends’, 抖音、小紅書上的台灣青少年：當本土認同與中國社群媒體熱潮並行,Initium Media, 12 January 2023, online at: https://theinitium.com/article/20230113-taiwan-concerns-teens-chineseapps

^[24] Xu Jiaqi, ‘Postfeminism, capitalist traps or cultural united front work? We talked to the female users of Xiaohongshu in Taiwan’, 后女性主义？资本主义陷阱？文化统战？我们和“小红书“的台湾女性用户聊了聊, Wainao, 23 June 2022, online at:https://www.wainao.me/wainao-reads/xiaohongshu-in-taiwan-06232022

^[25] Shuyue Chen, ‘In the eyes of overseas young Chinese, Xiaohongshu becomes a ‘search engine’’, 海外中國年輕人眼中，意外成為「搜索引擎」的小紅書, Initium Media, 23 February 2023, online at: https://theinitium.com/article/20230223-mainland-overseas-students-xiaohongshu

^[26]Jenny Cai and Iris Zhao, ‘How Australian politicians are using emerging Chinese social media app Red’, ABC News, 3 November 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/politicians-campaigning-chinese-social-media-red-xiaohongshu/104482116

^[27] Yuwen Jing, ‘Temporary Migrants’ Reactions to Immigration-related Content on Social Media Platform: Taking Australian Chinese Temporary Migrants on Red (Xiaohongshu) as An Example’, SHS Web of Conferences, vol. 190, no. 03018, (2024): 1-5.

^[28] Wing Kuang, ‘Australian influencers on Xiaohongshu, and China influence in their eyes’, 以小红书为阵地的澳洲网红，和他们眼里的中国影响力, Wainao, 13 October 2021, online at:  https://www.wainao.me/wainao-reads/Xiaohongshu-Australian-influencer-10132021

^[29] Jenny Cai and Iris Zhao, ‘How Australian politicians are using emerging Chinese social media app Red’, ABC News, 3 November 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/politicians-campaigning-chinese-social-media-red-xiaohongshu/104482116

^[30] Shuyue Chen, ‘Please help me look good: when foreign internet users seek makeup advice on Xiaohongshu’, 请帮助我发光：当外国网友到小红书寻求外形改造, Initium Media, 22 February 2024, online at: https://theinitium.com/zh-hans/article/20240223-mainland-foreign-users-little-red-book

^[31] Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou, U.S. TikTokers flock to Xiaohongshu, baffling and bonding with Chinese users, Rest of World, 14 January 2025, online at: https://restofworld.org/2025/tiktok-refugees-rednote-xiaohongshu-chinese-users/

^[32] Xingin, ‘REDnote – Xiaohongshu’s international version’, 小红书国际版, Google Play, 22 December 2024, online at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xingin.xhs&hl=zh

^[33] Xingin, ‘Xiaohongshu’, 小红书, Apple Store, 7 January 2025, online at:  https://apps.apple.com/au/app/%E5%B0%8F%E7%BA%A2%E4%B9%A6/id741292507

^[34] Xingin, ‘REDnote – Xiaohongshu’s international version’, 小红书国际版, Apple Store, 30 December 2024, online at: https://apps.apple.com/tz/app/rednote-%E5%B0%8F%E7%BA%A2%E4%B9%A6%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85%E7%89%88/id6499068935

^[35] Northern Territory government, ‘Tourism | NT Budget’, The Territory, 2024, online at: https://budget.nt.gov.au/industry-outlook/tourism#:~:text=on%20international%20visitors.-,Domestic%20visitation,consumer%20behaviour%20and%20higher%20airfares.

^[36] China Digital Space, ‘Xiaohongshu Censorship Encyclopedia’, 小红书审查百科, China Digital Times, August 2020, online at: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/%E5%B0%8F%E7%BA%A2%E4%B9%A6%E5%AE%A1%E6%9F%A5%E7%99%BE%E7%A7%91

^[37] Karen Wong, ‘Xiaohongshu to set up office in HK’, Marketing-Interactive, 28 November 2024, online at: https://www.marketing-interactive.com/xiaohongshu-to-set-up-office-in-hk

^[38] Eleanor Olcott and Ryan McMorrow, ‘China’s Instagram-like Xiaohongshu makes first profit’, Financial Times, 25 March 2024, online at: https://www.ft.com/content/1716fcfd-31fd-4dc3-9475-f04283fe3eaf

^[39] ​​Beihe, ‘Xiaohongshu e-commerce’ buyers: their rise and challenges’, 小红书点上‘淘金’人：佛系、崛起和犹疑, CBN Data, online at: https://www.cbndata.com/information/292933

^[40] Eliot Chen, ‘Failure to List’, The Wire China, 19 November 2023, online at: https://www.thewirechina.com/2023/11/19/failure-to-list-chinese-ipo-china-companies-stock-market/

^[41]  Eleanor Olcott, ‘Chinese Social Media Sensation Xiaohongshu Win Major foreign VC Backing’, Financial Times, 11 July 2024, online at:  https://www.ft.com/content/2d5f515f-d341-41c8-ace5-16a16cb33e35

^[42] Pandaily, ‘Xiaohongshu Denies Reports of $20 Billion pre-IPO Financing Round’, Pandaily, 29 April 2024, online at: https://pandaily.com/xiaohongshu-denies-reports-of-20-billion-pre-ipo-financing-round/

^[43] enny Cai and Iris Zhao, ‘How Australian politicians are using emerging Chinese social media app Red’, ABC News, 3 November 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/politicians-campaigning-chinese-social-media-red-xiaohongshu/104482116

^[44] Cailin Zheng, ‘Job-quitting vloggers: pretending to be relaxed is harder than going to work’, 假装松弛的离职博主，比上班卷多了, iFeng, 30 June 2024, online at: https://news.ifeng.com/c/8apzXQiFP4G

^[45] No. 10 Company, ‘Xiaohongshu has banned over 8,700 posts that involved ‘showing off money’, bloggers are united to oppose showing off money’, Paper.cn, 18 November 2021, online at: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_15438246

^[46] Chi-hui Lin, ‘Chinese Social Media Companies Remove posts ‘Showing off Wealth and Worshipping Money’, The Guardian, 17 May 2024, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/17/chinese-social-media-companies-remove-posts-showing-off-wealth-and-worshiping-money

^[47] Guancha Jun, ‘China’s rich ladies are outdated, as ‘United Nations ladies’ are emerging on Xiaohongshu’, 国内假名媛过时了，小红书正在批量制造‘联合国名媛， Guancha.cn, 23 November 2024, online at: https://user.guancha.cn/main/content?id=1337163

^[48] Juan Hou, ‘Is it the end of Xiaohongshu?’, 小红书要‘黄’了？, People.cn, 2019, online at: http://paper.people.com.cn/zgjjzk/html/2019-08/15/content_1945098.htm

The post Who’s Afraid of the Little Red Book appeared first on The China Story.

The editors

Kou Aizhe: The short happy Antarctic summer ends too soon and is followed by a long winter.

Many scientific researchers return home to China at the end of summer as most Antarctic research can only be done in the summer months. Only a small number of staff are left at the research station for what is known as 越冬 ‘winter-over’.^[1] Cao Jianxi used to be one of the team members wintering over at the research station, responsible for ensuring that the research station operated normally during the winter months.

‘Wintering over’: A gruelling experience

Once we are wintering over, everyone’s workload is much lighter. Someone like me, who is in charge of the kitchen, only has to make sure meat and vegetables are brought in from the storeroom and ready for cooking the next day.

We rise much later in winter as the sun only rises after ten o’clock in the morning, when it is almost time for lunch. Between lunch and dinner, we have plenty of time to ourselves.

I’d often sit by my bed, wrapped up in a warm blanket to play online games or watch movies. There was a particular actress, I can’t remember whether I saw her on TV or in a movie, but I was very fond of her at that time, and thought her very beautiful.

She has very oriental features, with a delicate ‘melon-seed’ oval face. She appeared wearing a crimson veil and appeared against a red background.

I took a photo with my mobile phone and would often stare at it, my heart heavy with loneliness and the yearning for a companion.

Although there were other people at the station, our interactions were minimal. In this sort of closed environment, the longer we stayed together the more silent and withdrawn we became, with no desire to connect with anyone, just amusing ourselves alone in our rooms.

Those who are more extroverted, especially the older ones, seemed less affected by the isolation. The younger team members tend to be more quick tempered, and would ignore the others if they were in a bad mood.

At times an older team member would walk into the dining hall and, sensing the negative vibe, would attempt to lighten the mood by telling jokes or asking people how they were going.

But the strange thing is, they would get no response from the others. As you can imagine, under such circumstances, that made most team members felt even more depressed.

It was also common to see conflict among team members. I personally experienced this: as the period of isolation grew longer, the more my relationship with my direct superior deteriorated. At the start, we got along well because we were polar research centre co-workers.

But later, because of the nature of our working relationship, he made more demands on me than others. Sometimes it was over small things like cigarettes or alcohol. I would get annoyed and feel like he is mistreating me or that he wasn’t looking after me. As time went by our relationship worsened with every such incident.

As a result, my relationship with the station master deteriorated as well. Even when winter was over, we could not repair our relationship. In normal life, if we run into problems at work, we can always go home or go for a drink or a meal with friends after work to relieve our stress. But in the extreme conditions of the South Pole, that isn’t an option. We are always together. If something goes badly today, tomorrow we still have to continue working together. Frustrations build up and never go away.

Food

Kou Aizhe: In Antarctica, growing crops is strictly prohibited.^[2] All crops are considered ‘exotic species’ that risk damaging its unique environment. Of course, the harsh conditions in Antarctica are not conducive to growing crops either, so supplies of food and other necessities are completely dependent on infrequent transport links to the station.

The popular Chinese saying goes, ‘Food is the people’s heaven’. Even when they are at the ‘end of the world’, those stationed in the Antarctica are determined not to compromise on their enjoyment of food. It is at times like this when culinary creativity is at its most prolific.

My job as a manager at the research station means I am like the ‘housekeeper’. I manage all the storerooms, especially the kitchen store. Every day, I would go to the kitchen to prepare supplies, like alcohol, other drinks, rice and flour. Our dishes mostly consisted of dried goods from the north-east of China because they could be kept for a long period of time. It was rare to have green leafy vegetables. Usually we’d eat bean curd strips, seaweed and other dried goods that had to be soaked in water first.

Among twelve of us who stayed behind in the winter months, there was a chef by the name of Old Zhu. He used to be the main chef on board the [icebreaker and resupply ship] Xue Long.

Before each meal, one of us rang the bell outside the dining hall. Sometimes it was me, sometimes the chef himself or one of the kitchen hands, and then everyone would come to eat.

At the station, big steel trays were used for serving meals, which usually consisted of three dishes, such as chicken or black fungus stir fried with sliced pork belly, and a soup, typically egg-based with seaweed, which was vacuum packed; all we had to do was to steep it in hot water first.

We also had desiccated vegetables, but no matter what we did with them, they were flavourless.

Sometimes we would have barbeques outdoors using large steel plates and long iron skewers. Barbeques were fun, especially after the tide receded and lots of abalones were left stranded on the rocks. We would barbeque abalones on a large metal plate as if they were lamb on skewers. Those abalones were the best I have ever eaten – extremely tender.

When celebrating festivals or birthdays, we would prepare more dishes, sometimes a dozen or so, in smaller portions and served on white porcelain plates. We would lay them out on a table covered with a white tablecloth, plus flowers for decoration. The flowers were plastic, but it looked pretty.

To celebrate the birthdays of our teammates, Chef Zhu would also bake a cake. The station manager would pass a birthday card around for everyone to sign. On each card would be twelve signatures, making it something worth keeping.

On special occasions like the Mid-Autumn Festival, I would also make banners that read ‘China’s 22nd Antarctic Scientific Expedition Team at the Great Wall Station Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival’. I would print out the Chinese characters individually on A4-size sheets and pin them together on a scroll of red cloth to make a long banner.

End of winter

Kou Aizhe: The first time Cao Jianxi spent the winter at the polar research station, he had a calendar pinned up in his room and he would stare at it for ages every day, studying it minutely, counting down the days until his return home.

But as the end of wintering over drew nearer, Cao had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was dying to see his family and friends. Over and over, he’d imagine the scenes of meeting them all again in detail.

On the other hand, human society became like a beautiful dreamscape. The long separation from society instilled a sense of anxiety in Cao, who worried whether returning to a normal life would ever be possible.

After more than a year’s wait, the day finally came for Cao to finish wintering over.

When I was in Antarctica, I never thought I’d go back. But back in China, I found myself having difficulties adapting to society. Like a prisoner who has been released after a long jail term of more than a decade or do, I found it hard to get used to a life of freedom and was nostalgic for the prison environment.

After many months of trying to adapt, I decided to return to Antarctica. Society was a little hard to fit into.

Life and death

Kou Aizhe: In 2007, Cao Jianxi boarded the icebreaker Xuelong, to join China’s 24th Antarctic Scientific Expedition to the South Pole. The first destination was Zhongshan Station. If Cao’s first ‘wintering over’ at the Great Wall Station had only subjected him to mental anguish, venturing into the interior of Antarctica was a severe ordeal that tested both his body and spirit.

Zhongshan Station was the second scientific research station that China built in the Antarctic. It is located in East Antarctica and is 4,986 kilometres away from Great Wall Station, making the distance between the two research stations even greater than that from Shanghai to Urumqi. What’s more, the climate in Zhongshan Station is much harsher.

It was during the 24th Expedition that Cao had the most dangerous experience of his life.

In Antarctica, you never know where the danger lies until you come face to face with it. The further you travel into the interior, the more dangerous it becomes. Accidents are common, especially for those venturing onto the endless plateau of snow, ice and glaciers for the first time.

When the icebreaker Xuelong arrived at Zhongshan Station with our research team, we had to start unloading 10 to 20 nautical miles from the station. This is because the Xuelong could only drive through ice up to 1.1 metres thick. We had to use snowmobiles and sledges to transport our cargo from the vessel to the station.

This zone is notorious for its haphazard formation of ice sheets, resulting from huge blocks of old ice bonding together and refreezing. This makes the structure of the ice non-uniformly thick, with some places thick and others thin.

As a precaution, having two drivers (a pilot and a co-pilot) operate an oversnow vehicle is the norm. This boosts safety because in an emergency, one person can radio in a report.

At the time, a very experienced chief mechanic, Mr Xu Xiaxing, decided to drive an oversnow vehicle on his own, so as to allow the other members of the team to rest. He didn’t take a sledge, which signified it was an empty vehicle. We’d put caterpillar treads on it while it was still in the hold, and it was the best equipped of all the vehicles. The crane moved it from the hold onto the ice.

Mr Xu wanted to move the vehicle to another spot and began driving.

Our assistant expedition guide Wang Hailang was on duty in the control room of the Xuelong. He witnessed the whole episode. The vehicle began moving forward when it suddenly stalled and began spinning. Then, suddenly, it started sinking.

When Mr Xu discovered his oversnow vehicle had stalled, he thought all he had to do was pump the accelerator to get the vehicle to lurch forward, as he had done before. But this was a totally different situation: the area’s ice layer was too thin. Underneath, it was already broken into ice debris. The vehicle started sinking rapidly, as if the wheels were shovelling up ice from below.

When the oversnow vehicle first started sinking, Mr Xu didn’t panic. He still thought that hitting the accelerator would solve the problem by propelling it forward and freeing it from the ice. But before he realised it, the vehicle had sunk to a considerable depth and a stream of bubbles began to burst forth from its interior. Only then did terror enter his heart, and he thought of his family. He realised the peril he was in and feared this would be the end of him.

Water gradually flooded the car. He prepared to escape but couldn’t open any of the windows or its sunroof owing to the pressure of the water. Pushing open the door would be futile for the same reason.

However, the window on the driver’s side could slide back and forth. By chance, Mr Xu managed to push that window open. Water rushed into the car and completely flooded the interior.

He then tried to escape through the sunroof.

The sunroof was like that of a family car, except it was not able to open fully. It could only be cracked open to a 5- or 10-degree angle at most.

Mr Xu decided to stand on the vehicle’s middle console and push up as hard as he could to force the sunroof open. The connecting rod of the sunroof gave way completely, opening the only possible escape route for him.

He tried to float to the surface, but he continued to sink. His boots were caught.

Those boots were specially designed to withstand a temperature of around minus 30 degrees Celsius so they were extremely bulky and heavy. But he eventually managed to free himself from them. He’d used up almost all his energy and swallowed another mouthful of ice-cold sea water.

After he had made his escape from the sunroof, he swam upward with all his might, until he heard his head bump against the ice debris, and knew he’d reached the top. He raised his hand and ascertained he’d found the ice hole.

The rescue team still hadn’t reached him, but he climbed his way out onto dry ice all by himself. He managed to make two steps before collapsing.

As a result of this, all the work of the research team came to a temporary stop. Everyone was at a complete loss. The whole team’s spirit sank to an all-time low.

Return to Antarctica

Kou Aizhe: After his fourth expedition to Antarctica, Cao Jianxi resigned from the Polar Research Centre. Not long after, he moved to Australia and began a new phase of his life.

After leaving China, I didn’t think about returning to Antarctica. I threw myself into an entirely new life. I got married and devoted my time and energy to raising a family.

At first, I wasn’t nostalgic or keen to think about those days. Nor did I want to dig out old photos and videos. However, with the passing of time, I began thinking more and more of the memories of those events.

In Antarctica, under such harsh conditions, a small group of us still managed to work together using our own skills to complete our mission. There is a sense of camaraderie in having been through thick and thin together, akin to that of having been comrades-in-arms on a battlefield.

I feel like this deep connection is too precious to be discarded or forgotten. It is so rare in one’s life to have relationships built on shared experiences of life and death.

By chance, a friend asked if I was interested in working on board a cruise ship specialising in tours to Antarctica. The steep increase in the number of Chinese tourists in recent years has raised the demand for people like me, who know Antarctica and speak English and Chinese.

At first, I didn’t take this opportunity seriously, but when night came, I thought more deeply and got very excited. Things big and small that happened when I was living and working in Antarctica, the friendship and connection with teammates, started to play out in my mind. If I returned, I would be return to my old circles.

I felt an urgent desire to go back, a bit like how I felt the first time I was bound for Antarctica after college. But before I ventured back, the cruise company decided that I should travel to the Arctic a few times first. As a result, I visited Iceland and Greenland several times. Some six months later, I was finally on my way back to Antarctica.

When the cruise ship arrived at Antarctica, the sight of the snow-capped mountains and glaciers in the far distance made me extremely emotional, and tears welled in my eyes.

When I went ashore, I felt that I knew every rock and stone was familiar. I also ran into a teammate who once wintered over in the same year with me at the research station. He was very happy to see me and cooked some noodles for us. I felt extremely happy and excited. I really hadn’t expected that.

In that distant place, I returned to where I first started, as if some mystical power is at work, or perhaps this is just what is meant to be. When Heaven opens a door for me, I linger hesitantly at the doorway, but when I finally decide to cross the threshold, I keep going.

Notes from the translator

[1] 越冬 or ‘winter-over’ is a specific term used to denote the process by which researchers in the South Pole steel themselves to pass through the long and often difficult winters. It implies a degree of tenacity on the part of the researchers to adjust their way of living in the research centre to wait out the winter season.

[2] Many research stations in the South Pole have, however, set up hydroponic gardens in greenhouses for research purposes as early as 1902. By 2015 there were at least forty-six different facilities in Antarctica where researchers had grown plants at some time or another as scientific experiments. Matthew Bamsey, Paul Zabel, Conrad Zeidler et al., ‘Review of Antarctic greenhouses and plant production facilities: A historical account of food plants on the ice’, Paper presented at the 45th International Conference on Environment Systems, Bellevue, WA, USA, 12–16 July 2015: 1–37. Accessed 15 September 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280738927_Review_of_Antarctic_Greenhouses_and_Plant_Production_Facilities_A_Historical_Account_of_Food_Plants_on_the_Ice

The post Loneliness, Death and Desolation: Why I Return to Antarctica Time and Again appeared first on The China Story.

Government policy towards its ageing population has undergone significant changes in the last three decades. Starting from the 1990s, the central government largely viewed population ageing as a social issue and introduced such policies as mandatory pension system and accessible aged-care services. Following the slowdown in the Chinese economy since COVID-19, the central government started to view population ageing through the lens of economic development. While older people can be important contributors to society and the economy, this article shows that treating them only as consumers overlooks other potential and fails to address some important challenges presented by the ageing population.

Social policy changes towards elder care

In 1991, the State Council released its ‘Decision Regarding Reform of the Basic Pension Insurance System for Enterprise Employees’ 国务院关于企业职工基本养老保险制度改革的决定 and initiated a pension system, which encouraged individuals and their employers to contribute to pension provident funds.^[3] To this day, the system is still being modified to reduce regional discrepancies and to enhance equity between rural and urban areas and to allow for easier transfer of pension accounts between regions. Operating on a pay-as-you-go social insurance model, the pension system works on the assumption that the current working-age population will finance the pensions of the elderly.^[4] However, having a rapidly ageing population means that a shrinking proportion of younger workers are responsible for funding the pensions of a growing proportion of retired people. If no corrective action is taken, the pension system will eventually collapse.^[5]

Pensions alone cannot answer all the needs of the elderly in the absence of accessible aged-care services such as affordable nursing homes or domestic assistance. In 2000, private aged-care providers, which emerged in the late 1990s, were incentivised to work with district and street-level governments and community authorities 居委会 to expand the capacity of aged-care services. As demand continued to grow, the central government decided to allow the market to pay a bigger role. In 2016, the General Office of the State Council published a document titled ‘Several Suggestions on Fully Liberalising the Elderly Care Service Market and Improving the Quality of Elderly Care Services’ 关于全面放开养老服务市场提升养老服务质量的若干意见.^[6] As a result of this policy, the private market for aged care thrived. However, private providers tend to focus on high-end users, and costs are often prohibitive for ordinary pensioners. Moreover, private providers proved more interested in providing services primarily for the healthy elderly.^[7]

Some promising market solutions did emerge. Due to the restrictions on official spending imposed by ‘Eight Central Regulations’ 中央八项规定 in 2012,^[8] the hospitality sector, such as spas, hotels or restaurants, built during China’s fast economic growth era, became sluggish. Many buildings were left unused, mostly in peri-urban areas. Business owners were reluctant to give up and hoped that the restrictive policy could be relaxed soon and the market would revive.^[9] As they were waiting, some business owners started to notice that the shortage of pensioners’ homes could be their new business opportunities and started to convert their business venues to aged-care facilities or age-friendly properties. In this way, they can earn rent or service fees.^[10] With no signs of relaxing restrictions on official consumption, city governments, such as Nanjing and Beijing, began to implement favourable policies, including land tenure, business licensing or direct subsidies to support the conversion of unused buildings (such as factory buildings, community service rooms, urban hostels and rural collective land and facilities) into aged-care facilities or age-friendly homes.^[11] Due to this policy support, care home operators in renovated facilities are able to charge less than those in newly built care homes so their homes therefore more affordable.^[12] However, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, older individuals have become reluctant to reside in care homes. A 2020 survey by the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that around 50 percent of the 4.29 million beds in aged-care homes were empty.^[13]

Even with affordable agedcare institutions and the passing of the worst of the pandemic, most older people prefer to live independently at home. This means there need to be such services as basic health checks, food delivery or assistance in domestic chores that the elderly can access conveniently near their own home. In the 1990s, the central government began to experiment with the idea of ‘community building’ 社区建设 : making residential communities a centre for service delivery and mutual support. It was a shift from employer-provision (also known as work unit provision单位提供) instituted during the central planning era. With services provided in urban communities, older people’s needs can be addressed through socialised services delivered by private providers or NGOs. Since its inception, the service provision system has been restructured several times. The newest official target is for 97 percent of seniors (defined as 60 or older) to receive basic support and primary healthcare at home and/or in the residential community they live in, while the remaining 3 percent, who were unable to live independently, could live in private aged-care institutions.

This system faces two challenges: the lack of guaranteed consistent funding support and a qualified workforce. To support the funding of care services, a long-term care insurance system was introduced in 2016 with 15 cities as pilots, and 49 cities currently participate in pilot programs.^[14] To increase labour supply, a professional standard for aged-care workers was introduced in 2019, and many city authorities set up geriatric nursing schools to train more aged-care workers.^[15]

Government to the elderly: wallets over work

In 2024, the Chinese government formally announced the policy ‘Opinions on Developing the Silver Economy to Enhance the Well-being of the Elderly’ 关于发展银发经济增进老年人福祉的意见. A decade ago, the government had begun piloting ‘silver economy’ programs in cities including Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Xiamen and Taicang while some other cities have taken the initiative to carry out such programs themselves.^[16] Now, more cities follow suit in response to the central government’s effort to address demographic and economic issues in the post COVID-19 era.^[17] This is a significant policy shift, from treating the ageing population primarily as a social issue to leveraging it as an economic driver.

This consumer-oriented approach is promising in several ways. First, some of the older population have good savings, and their strong consumption power can be used to spur economic growth. Second, it targets the specific needs of older people, thereby enhancing their quality of life, supporting their lifestyles and ultimately improving their well-being. An array of tailored services and products are included in the government’s plan: meal assistance (including community dining halls), home-based elder care and public health services (including home visits by community doctors to carry out regular health checks for chronic diseases such as senior health check-up, advices or referral services), community-based cultural and sports activities (with dedicated rooms and facilities). There are also services including day care centres and game rooms for the rural population. Third, meeting the needs of the older population has the potential to stimulate innovation in new products, services and entrepreneurship.^[18] This new plan will stimulate more private investment in the relevant industries and services.^[19]

The policy shifts indicate that the government values the wallets of older people more than their work. Continuous industrial upgrading over the decades of economic reform have made many of the skills of older employees obsolete.^[20] Second, China’s economy is struggling to absorb its labour force. Before the pandemic, it was hoped that the increasingly prosperous internet economy and international trade would drive employment.^[21] However, the economy has been struggling since the pandemic, with many small and medium-sized businesses closing due to a decline in trade.^[22] Meanwhile, the last statistics released on youth unemployment showed it at more than 20 percent, and there are ever more university graduates, with the number expected to exceed 11.79 million in 2024.^[23]

What does active ageing look like in China?

In China, the mandatory retirement age is unusually low: 60 for male and 55 for female in managerial positions; 60 for male and 50 female for manual workers; and 55 for male and 45 for female in heavy labour workers who have at least ten consecutive years of work experience.^[24] Early retirement has brought further challenges as the younger retired cohort want to be active and socially engaged. ‘Public square dancing’ 广场舞 in which participants – mostly women – dance to loud music in public squares and parks has been a popular phenomenon for years. There have been frequent conflicts between the dancers and local residents because of the noise and disruption to traffic, which working-age families fear could affect the value of their property.^[25] Some local governments have introduced regulations concerning the use of public spaces and noise levels. In the past two years, building more public sports facilities has been written into the annual Central Government Work Report 政府工作报告.^[26] According to the ‘National Fitness Facilities Improvement Action Plan (2023–2025)’ 全民健身场地设施提升行动工作方案 (2023–2025年), in community centres, parks and other public spaces where new fitness equipment is installed, the number of age-friendly fitness equipment (including those for older people and children) should not be less than 50 percent of all equipment. All public sports venues will provide fitness activity spaces for the elderly. Financially better-off areas can build and equip age-friendly fitness equipment and provide services such as Senior Exercise and Health Homes offering chronic disease exercise intervention, exercise health management and dissemination of health knowledge.

According to the China Association of the Universities for the Aged 中国老年大学协会, as of the end of 2019, there were approximately 76,000 Universities for the Aged in China (老年大学; like the University of the Third Age in Australia). About 10.9 million students enrolled, and more than 80 percent of the enrolled students were younger than 70, with half of the students aged 60 to 69. Pre-pandemic, the demand for such education was so high that vacancies were allocated by lottery. During pandemic, however, most of these universities curtailed their courses due to concerns about virus transmission. Post-lockdown, there was a lag in reopening the courses, so about 10 million older people could not go to the university as before. Online teaching started to enter the third age education sector, and the Online University for the Aged 网上老年大学 was founded and more than a thousand teachers and 700 universities across the country joined the platform.^[27] However, digital learning cannot replace face-to-face learning for the students as many of them participated in learning activities to avoid being socially inactive and overcome loneliness.^[28] These days, online services are upgraded to provide teaching materials and public lectures that can be attended by students across the country. By April 2023, there are more than 20 million students attending the University of the Aged. About 40 percent of older people participated in learning activities, both online and offline. The university system has developed into a five-level educational network consisting of provinces, cities, counties, townships (streets) and villages (communities).^[29]

Seniors themselves, without official support, have formed groups for social outings, consumer activities and travel. According to a report released by the China Tourism Academy in July 2023, 67.50 million older people travelled for tourism in 2020. Seniors (aged 65 and above) residing in urban areas on average spent CNY1209.2 (US$167) per trip while their rural counterparts spent CNY847.5 (US$117). The report further showed that older people expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional senior tourism market, which offered only a narrow range of products and experiences. They longed for a more culturally enriching experience, emphasising personal growth and opportunities for social engagement.^[30] Given that the older population will continue to grow in numbers, there may be a higher proportion of older people travelling and, with higher costs for the more desirable tourist experiences, the report estimated that by the end of 2025, the revenues of domestic senior tourism could reach 1.14 trillion yuan (US$160 billion).^[31]

It may be easy to infer that China’s seniors have responded positively to ‘silver economy’ policies that support active ageing. The reality is less straightforward.

Elderly to government: I want to contribute, but not on your terms

Since 2012, every time the central government proposed the idea of postponing the legal retirement age due to the sustainability of pension funds, the response was a strong backlash from the public on social media.^[32] Many internet-based surveys were conducted over the years, all of which found that the majority were against postponing retirement. In one survey, some 90 percent rejected the idea.^[33]

An obvious concern is that working extra years means people have to contribute to the pension fund for a longer period and enjoy a shorter retirement life. People have calculated that if the monthly pension amount that retirees receive does not change, they would ultimately pay more and receive less. A survey conducted by Economic Daily, a state-owned newspaper, showed that workers who endured years of low pay during China’s central planning era (1950–80) were particularly against delaying retirement age, having accepted reduced pay in return for a state-funded old age pension at the established age.^[34] In contrast, those employed by government departments and public institutions with better welfare coverage voted most favourably in postponing retirement.^[35] Currently, China’s retirement age is set uniformly across most occupations and all regions, offering no flexibility for individual circumstances. For instance, even though blue-collar workers find it harder to do manual labour after a certain age,^[36] the lack of reliable universal social protection for them after retirement means that many people, especially migrant workers, simply cannot afford to retire.^[37]

Given the mounting pressure of population ageing, in 2021, the central government introduced a gradual postponement plan with small-step adjustments; that is, delaying retirement by a few months each year.^[38] Despite the fact that it is an unavoidable change, the official expression of policy in this area, as in others, tends to focus on the economy or society rather than individuals. Telling people to work more years because the pension funds need more contributors to be sustainable sounds much like the discourse around shifting from the One-Child Policy to the Three-Child Policy. Women and employees are perceived as mere instruments for sustaining an ailing economy.

Beyond employment, older people contribute to society in other ways. Previously, in the One-Child Policy era, older people played an important role as caregivers, not just in the case of looking after migrant workers’ ‘left-behind children’ 留守儿童 but also where there is absence of affordable and good-quality childcare.^[39] In 2021, the government published ‘The Implementation Plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan: Ageing Population Project and Childcare Infrastructure Construction 十四五老龄化工程和托育建设实施方案 designed to ensure that families have access to affordable, high-quality childcare options that support the well-being and development of children.^[40] Following this policy, the number of registered childcare enterprises increased from 1892 in 2020 to 5561 in 2021 and then to 14,191 in 2022.^[41] These enterprises operated 75,000 childcare institutions offering services to 3.5 million children across the country.^[42] Such exponential growth in the availability of childcare facilities helped to ease pressure on middle-class families – and grandparents who otherwise were being asked to babysit as well.^[43]

During COVID-19, community volunteering activities, such as maintaining environmental hygiene, community patrolling, food sorting and delivery, have become more active in urban China, including among seniors.^[44] It was good for the mental health of residents, in particular for the seniors.^[45] The government saw this as an opportunity to push for greater civic engagement and supplement the shortage of care labour force.^[46] However, on the whole, Chinese seniors are not yet very active in volunteering, probably because of the traditional thinking that older people should receive care from others instead of giving care themselves. This mentality had been reported even before COVID-19.^[47] However, it has been observed that the younger senior cohort are more likely to participate in time-banking whereby they can accumulate credits for helping others.^[48] These credits can be used for buying goods and services. Obviously, this is not as altruistic as volunteering without compensation. But as long as older people could benefit from time-banking by leading an active life and supporting others in need, there is no reason why they have to engage with society out of pure altruism.

The Chinese government’s silver economy plan is meant to use one stone to hit several birds: meeting the specific needs of older people, propelling economic growth and boosting innovation in new products, services and entrepreneurship. It represents a step forward in recognising the importance of the ageing population not just as a social issue but also as an economic issue. However, the policy falls short of realising the full potential of this demographic. It focuses too much on the wallet rather than the human resources of older people, overlooking the rich tapestry of experience, wisdom and capability they offer. The way ahead is to recognise that the real value of the silver economy is not just in how much the elderly can spend but also what they can do. The challenge, however, lies in winning the trust of older people. Rather than making them all eat in community canteens, policy-makers should probably need first to ask people how they define a happy and constructive old age.

Notes

^[1] Xiuli Liu, Mun S. Ho, Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Yuxing Dou, Shouyang Wang, Guangzhou Wang, Dabo Guan and Shantong Li, ‘Ageing population, balanced diet and China’s grain demand’, Nutrients, vol. 15, no. 13, 2023, p. 2877.

^[2] Rong Chen, Ping Xu, Peipei Song, Meifeng Wang and Jiangjiang He, ‘China has faster pace than Japan in population ageing in next 25 years’, Bioscience Trends, vol. 13, no. 4, 2019, pp. 287–91.

^[3] State Council, ‘The State Council’s decision on the reform of the basic pension insurance system for enterprise employees’ 国务院关于企业职工基本养老保险制度改革的决定, Guofa (1991), No. 33.

^[4] Hsuan-Chih Lin, Atsuko Tanaka and Po-Shyan Wu, ‘Shifting from pay-as-you-go to individual retirement accounts: A path to a sustainable pension system’, Journal of Macroeconomics, vol. 69, 2021, 103329.

^[5] Junqiang Han and Yingying Meng, ‘Decreased contribution rates increase public pension fund revenue: Evidence from China’, Journal of Ageing and Social Policy, vol. 33, no. 2, 2021, pp. 120–37.

^[6] General Office of the State Council, ‘Several suggestions on fully liberalising the elderly care service market and improving the quality of elderly care services’ 关于全面放开养老服务市场提升养老服务质量的若干意见, Guobanfa (2016), No. 91.

^[7] Bingqin Li, ‘Population ageing and community-based old age care supply in China’, in Housing and Ageing Policies in Chinese and Global Contexts: Trends, Development and Policy Issues, ed. Terence Shum and Charles Kwong, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2023, pp. 79–95.

^[8] Central Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China, ‘The eight regulations of the 18th Central Political Bureau on improving work style and strengthening contact with the masses’ (十八届中央政治局关于改进工作作风、密切联系群众的八项规定), December 2012, Central Government Portal, online at: https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2014-11/02/content_2774141.htm

^[9] Lifei Huang and Fang Xiao, ‘Hunan and Hubei-themed restaurants suffer losses and rush to close down, while Hunan catering enterprises display various strategies to get through the winter’, China Daily, 18 July 2013, online at: http://finance.people.com.cn/n/2013/0722/c1004-22273248.html

^[10] Hui Cheng and Lipeng Lin, ‘Nursing homes, hard to find (Special Report: New growth points around us? Elderly care services)’, 26 January 2015, online at: http://finance.people.com.cn/n/2015/0126/c1004-26447022.html

^[11] General Office of the People’s Government of Nanjing, ‘Measures for the planning, construction and management of elderly care service facilities in nanjing (trial)’, online at: 南京市养老服务设施规划建设管理办法（试行）, [2017] No. 125.

^[12] Bingqin Li, ‘Creating a service system from scratch: Community old age care services in China’, Dilemmas in Public Management in Greater China and Australia, ed. Kaifeng Yang, John Wanna, Tsai-Tsu Su and Andrew Podger, ANU Press, Canberra, 2023, pp. 473–96.

^[13] Chenwei Du and Yue Wu, ‘Many vacant beds in nursing homes, will it trigger an industry wide reshuffle?’, Jiefang Daily, 26 June 2023, online at: https://www.cnr.cn/shanghai/shzx/zq/20230626/t20230626_526303043.shtml

^[14] Zhanlian Feng, Elena Glinskaya, Hongtu Chen, Sen Gong, Yue Qiu, Jianming Xu and Winnie Yip, ‘Long-term care system for older adults in China: Policy landscape, challenges and future prospects’, Lancet, vol. 396, no. 10259, 2020, pp. 1362–72.

^[15] Li Bingqin, Jiwei Qian and Sisi Yang, ‘The mindset: Tackling the challenges of old age care in communities in China’, China: An International Journal, vol. 19, no. 3, 2021, pp. 148–67.

^[16] Lijie Fang and Bingqin Li, ‘The entrepreneurial welfare mix: The case of community-based old age services in China’, Social Policy and Society, 2023, pp. 1–10, online at: doi:10.1017/S1474746423000234

^[17] General Office of State Council, ‘The State Council General Office’s opinion on developing the silver economy to enhance the well-being of the elderly’ 国务院办公厅关于展银发经济增进年人福祉的意见, Guobanfa (2024) No. 1.

^[18] Interesse G, ‘Unlocking China’s elderly market: Tapping into the power of the “silver economy”’, China Briefing, 3 July 2023, online at: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/unleashing-the-potential-of-chinas-silver-economy/

^[19] Chad De Guzman and Koh Ewe, ‘China unveils extensive “silver economy” plan to adapt to ageing population’, Time, 15 January 2024, online at: https://time.com/55949/china-silver-economy-ageing-population-plan/

^[20] Bo Liu, ‘Age discrimination in Chinese internet workplace’, Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 27, 2024, pp. 172–80. Huiping Zhang, ‘Workplace victimization and discrimination in China: A nationwide survey’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2021, pp. 957–75.

^[21] Edmund Li Sheng, A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Governance of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore During COVID-19, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2024, pp. 69–87.

^[22] Cheng Huang, Gordon G. Liu and Zhejin Zhao, ‘Coming out of the pandemic: What have we learned and what should we learn?’, China Economic Review, vol. 79, 2023: 101934.

^[23] State Council Information Office PRC, ‘China to have 11.79m university graduates in 2024’, Xinhua News Agency, 6 December 2024, online at: http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2023-12/06/content_116861005.htm.

^[24] John Giles, Xiaoyan Lei, Gewei Wang, Yafeng Wang and Yaohui Zhao, ‘One country, two systems: Evidence on retirement patterns in China’, Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, vol. 22, no. 2, 2023, pp. 188–210.

^[25] Yue Xiao, Eddie C.M. Hui and Haizhen Wen, ‘The housing market impacts of human activities in public spaces: The case of the square dancing’, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, vol. 54, 2020: 126769.

^[26] State Council, ‘Report on the Work of the Government 2024’ 年政府工作报告, 14 March 2024, online at: http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/2024-03/14/content_117057714.htm.

^[27] Wangshang Laonian Daxue, 网上老年大学, ‘About us’, 2024, online at: https://www.wslndx.cn/aboutus.html.

^[28] Yuruo Lei, Jie Lao and Jiawei Liu, ‘Participation in community seniors’ organizations and mental health among retired adults in urban China: The mediating role of interpersonal needs’, Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 10, 2022: 1045948.

^[29] Insight and Info, ‘Analysis of the current development status and investment prospects of China’s Elderly Education Industry Report (2023–2030)’, 中国老年教育行业发展现状分析与投资前景研究报告(2023–2030年), 2023, online at: https://www.chinabaogao.com/baogao/202311/675605.html.

^[30] Keju Wang, ‘Great potential seen in senior tourism market’, China Daily, 8 February 2024, online at: https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202402/08/WS65c433bb498ed2d7b7ea7814/great-potential-seen-in-senior-tourism-market.html#:~:text=In%20a%20bid%20to%20further,inclusive%20environment%20for%20older%20adults.

^[31] Jing Zhang, ‘China’s report on the development of elderly health and wellness tourism: The demand for elderly tourism continues to increase and upgrade’, 4 July 2023, online at: https://www.mct.gov.cn/gtb/index.jsp?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mct.gov.cn%2Fwhzx%2Fzsdw%2Fzglyyjy%2F202307%2Ft20230704_945588.html

^[32] Joy Dong, ‘A greying China may have to put off retirement: Workers aren’t happy’, New York Times, 27 April 2021, online at: https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20210427/china-retirement-aging/-nytimeschinese/

^[33] Nan Xiang, ‘Survey of 10,000 people: 94.5% of respondents oppose delaying retirement’, 29 August 2013, online at: China Youth Daily, http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2013/0829/c1001-22729079.html

^[34] Li Bingqin, ‘Social pension unification in an urbanising China: Paths and constraints’, Public Administration and Development, vol. 34, no. 4, 2014, pp. 281–93.

^[35] Lijuan Wang and Jingjing Wang, ‘Media survey: How to balance the interests of all parties in the steady implementation of delayed retirement’, 29 March 2021, online at: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_11939262

^[36] Marina Schmitz, ‘Change in China? Taking stock of blue collars’ work values’, Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management, vol. 10, no. 1/2, 2019, pp. 49–68.

^[37] Vaishali Singh, ‘Ageing society and labour policy in China: Analysing policy challenges and options’, Chinese Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2018, pp. 242–50.

^[38] Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of PRC, ‘The Five-Year Plan for the Development of Human Resources and Social Security Affairs’, 人力资源和社会保障事业发展’十四五’规划’, 30 June 2021, online at: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/2021-06/30/content_5621671.htm

^[39] Yantao Ling, Zhe Song, Yang Yu and Tangyang Jiang, ‘Dealing with an ageing China – Delaying retirement or the second child policy?’, Plos one 16, no. 1, 2021: e0242252.

^[40] National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Civil Affairs, National Health Commission, ‘14th Five-Year Plan for Actively Responding to the Aging Population Project and Childcare Construction Implementation Scheme’ 十四五’ 积极应对人口老龄化工程和托育建设实施方案, 17 June 2021, NDRC Social [2021] No. 895 (updated 11 March 2024), https://www.sohu.com/a/769965819_121124337.

^[41] National Health Commission Childcare Institution Information Public Disclosure Platform, ‘National Childcare Institutions Filing Data Observation Report (As of July 31, 2023)’, 全国托育机构备案数据观察报告（截至2023年7月31日) 7 August 2023, online at: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1773539293895409363.

^[42] Yanfan Yang, ‘Inclusive childcare, supporting a happy childhood (big data observation)’ 普惠托育，托举幸福童年(大数据观察), People’s Daily, 31 May 2023, online at: https://www.gov.cn/yaowen/liebiao/202305/content_6883878.htm

^[43] Xiaohui Zhong and Minggang Peng, ‘The grandmothers’ farewell to childcare provision under China’s two-child policy: Evidence from Guangzhou middle-class families’, Social Inclusion, vol. 8, no. 2, 2020, pp. 36–46.

^[44] Lin Chen, Minzhi Ye and Yilin Wu, ‘Shaping identity: Older adults’ perceived community volunteering experiences in Shanghai’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 6, 2020, pp. 1259–75.

^[45] Wai Chan, Cheryl Hiu Kwan Chui, Johnson Chun Sing Cheung, Terry Yat Sang Lum and Shiyu Lu, ‘Associations between volunteering and mental health during COVID-19 among Chinese older adults’, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, vol. 64, no. 6, 2021, pp. 599–612.

^[46] Peizhi Li, ‘Promoting the high-quality development of volunteer services’ 推动志愿服务事业高质量发展, Guangming Daily, 17 January 2022, online at: https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2022-01/17/nw.D110000gmrb_20220117_2-06.htm

^[47] Hua-lei Yang, Shuo Zhang, Wen-chao Zhang et al., ‘Volunteer service and well-being of older people in China’, Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 10, 2022: 777178.

^[48] Shiyu Lu, Cheryl Chui and Terry Lum, ‘Facilitating volunteer engagement among older adults in social services: A case study of an innovative timebank program in a Chinese society’, Gerontologist, vol. 64, no. 1, 2024: gnad010.

The post From Mandatory Savings to Silver Economy: China’s Plans for its Elderly Population appeared first on The China Story.

Less noticed was what Sogavare—and the Pacific more broadly—received in return. A host of memorandums of agreement (MOUs) was signed, including the controversial security agreement, which was first leaked online by a provincial government adviser in 2022, but the final text, which covers military and police cooperation, has never been made public. China–Pacific relations also got their first policy slogan: the Four Fully Respects 四个充分尊重.^[3] Much of it was boilerplate doggerel around ‘win–win results’ and ‘shared benefits’, but it also touched on ‘cultural traditions of Pacific Island nations’ and the need to support the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent—a regional strategy agreed on by Pacific Island Forum nations in 2019 to tackle climate change against the background of geostrategic competition.^[4]

Unpromising beginnings

Less than a decade ago, China’s knowledge of and interest in the Pacific was rudimentary at best. Back in 2013, I worked with a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation (CAITEC), the think tank affiliated with China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). One of their team was tasked with coming up with China’s five-year plan for its relations with the Kingdom of Tonga, which would map out China’s strategies for aid, investment and trade with the one Pacific nation never to have been colonised. It looked to be a sensitive mission. Tonga already figured large in fears about China’s intent in the region, with some analysts arguing that the kingdom might ‘fall’ to China as a result of debts owed to China Exim Bank dating back to 2006.^[5]

I had expected the researcher, fresh from a posting in Pakistan, to be familiar with the history of China’s engagement with the kingdom, which switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan in November 1998 as part of its confusingly named ‘Look East’ policy.^[6] There was no shortage of entertaining detail for him to become familiar with: a 1996 deal brokered by the Tongan princess Pilolevu to lease Tonga’s satellite spots to China after the kingdom – with the help of a colourful American businessman—had acquired the world’s last 16 unoccupied orbital slots. Another deal that should have caught his attention was the origin story of China’s ‘debt trap diplomacy’ in the Pacific, where the construction company China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) brokered a China Exim Bank loan to rebuild Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, following anti-Chinese riots in 2006, breezily promising (never in writing) that the debt would be forgiven one day. China still holds nearly two-thirds of the Kingdom’s external debt.

To my disappointment, the researcher, flown out on the tab of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) China to write his country report and assess sectors where Australia and China might team up on aid projects,^[7] was not fully familiar with his brief. A week before heading to Shougang Airport for the long trip via Australia and New Zealand, he expressed surprise that he was not heading to Africa. He had assumed that he was off to Togo (duoge 多哥) rather than Tonga (tangjia 汤加).

Ten years since this unpromising start, a transformation has taken place. The Chinese government has invested in the teaching of Pacific languages—at Beijing Foreign Studies University, it is possible to study all the languages of China’s Pacific diplomatic partners, even Cook Islands Maori. The field of Pacific studies is still relatively small,^[8] although there are already six main research centres, led by the early mover: Sun Yat-sen University’s Center for Oceania Studies, and the heavily funded Research Centre for Pacific Island Countries at Liaocheng University. The last benefits from a whole-of-university approach—even the vice chancellor at Liaocheng is engaged in Pacific studies – and institutional links to both the Shandong Provincial Government and the International Liaison Department, a Party agency charged with managing relations between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and foreign political parties.^[9]

The quality of historical and political research coming out of China on the Pacific is still mixed. At one end, there are serious scholars equipped to engage in extended archival and field research in the Pacific and to conduct sophisticated analysis of how the Pacific is portrayed in China.^[10] At the other end, I can recall an international conference in 2015 where participants sitting in the shade of the Great Hall Fale at the National University of Samoa silently exchanged incredulous glances as a senior academic from Liaocheng University shared her knowledge of an alleged secret plan by Banimarama’s Fijian military to invade New Zealand.

Weaponising Pacific history

Despite such misfires, Chinese research on the Pacific has laid the foundations for strengthening ties with Pacific Island countries.

The Chinese state—and particularly its propaganda organs—is beginning to apply Mao’s famous aphorism ‘using the past to serve the present’ (gu wei jin yong 古为今用) to the Pacific. Since the Chinese state had very little to do with the Pacific before the 1970s, it is using the West’s Pacific colonial past to serve the present.

Although the Pacific was once relatively neglected—Mao’s shorthand for the developing world was ‘Asia-Africa-Latin America’ (ya fei mei 亚非美)—PRC academics with knowledge of the region are in high demand to provide comment for outlets like the Global Times, China’s influential nationalist tabloid. Such researchers as Yu Lei 于镭, from Shandong University, provide critical commentary about Western colonialism in the Pacific. In 2023 Australia agreed to resettle the entire population of Tuvalu under the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty,^[11] which had neocolonial overtones,^[12] particularly Article 4, which required: ‘Tuvalu shall mutually agree with Australia any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other State or entity on security and defence-related matters. Such matters include but are not limited to defence, policing, border protection, cyber security and critical infrastructure, including ports, telecommunications and energy infrastructure.’ Commenting in the Global Times, Yu Lei argued the treaty demonstrated that ‘former colonial powers’ wanted these countries to remain ‘politically subservient … and economically reliant’ on them through ‘instructions and manipulation’.^[13]

Although in its early stages, the popular deployment of historical narratives is likely to provide focus to China’s discovery of Pacific colonial histories, as China—which has no historical baggage in the Pacific— looks to ‘tell its story well’ 讲好中国故事 in the Pacific. Part of that story is that unlike three of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), China has not conducted any nuclear tests in the Pacific.

Chen Hong 陈弘, another prominent academic at East China Normal University, who gained the distinction in Australia of having his visa cancelled for allegedly trying to influence a NSW government backbencher,^[14] was among the first to examine the deplorable nuclear legacy of the United States. His work has highlighted Operation Castle Bravo, the first of a series of tests on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the first fusion nuclear bomb tested anywhere and still the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States.^[15] The United States, the United Kingdom and France detonated 315 nuclear devices in the Pacific over three decades, including twelve in Australia.^[16]

There are entire swathes of colonial history that China’s commentariat have yet to exploit, presumably because they have yet to come across them. The practice of blackbirding, whereby Pacific islanders were often taken either by force or under false pretenses, to provide slave labour for Queensland’s sugar plantations, has yet to feature in the Global Times.

The frontiers of China’s narrative competition

Future Chinese criticism of blackbirding, which began in the 1840s and was banned by law only in 1904, might not cause many current Australian politicians to lose sleep. But it would not hurt our standing in the region to make an official apology for the practice. The renaming of New South Wales’s Ben Boyd National Park—named for Australia’s first blackbirder—as Beowa National Park in 2022 was a good first step. But apologising for running a slave trade that tore tens of thousands of Pacific islanders from their families should not be a hard sell in Australia’s parliament.

Australia’s relations with Pacific Island counties have begun to evolve. If there is a moment we can look back on as a shift in Australia’s relationship with the region, it might well be 18 October 2023, when the Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV) finally passed the Australian Senate with the support of the Greens and the crossbench. Bipartisan support for the PEV once looked likely, but the Coalition walked away from an initiative they once championed, objecting to the use of a lottery system.^[17] The lottery element is why New Zealand’s Samoa Quota and Pacific Access Visa (which the PEV is modelled on) are so popular—everyone can agree a random lottery is fair.

The significance of the PEV lies in its potential to transform Australia into a nation that looks more like the Pacific. When politicians turn their minds to the needs of Pacific constituents, as we see in New Zealand, the game will change. That is some way down the track, but the PEV is a start. Reams of research show that access to permanent migration is more effective than development assistance for Pacific islanders—and the gains to Pacific families are almost immediate. As Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad argued, ‘This is part of a broader strategy to integrate the region in the long term. And given the geopolitics as well, uniting the region in this way will benefit the whole of the region.’^[18] Welcoming Pacific migrants is something that China cannot and will not do.

Despite the easy win represented by the PEV, bilateral competition in defence, economic ties and aid will continue to frame China and Australia’s relations in the Pacific, with Australian governments of both stripes vying to be the ‘partner of choice’ for Pacific nations. Yet all three fields of contestation come with historical complications. Military needs—be they an airfield, a naval base or semi-automatic weapons— can be acted on much more quickly than economic or developmental needs. Nonetheless, Australia’s military spending in the region continues to be shaped by historical concerns about the presence of a hostile power in its immediate vicinity, raised by political leaders as far back as 1883, and the need for Papua New Guinea to be a ‘shield’ against Asia, be it imperial Japan or newly independent Indonesia.^[19] This reinforces a longstanding perception that Australia is more interested in securing the region’s territory for its own safety than contributing to the well-being of Pacific peoples.

The American public might romanticise the United States’ defining Pacific conflict, the battle of Guadalcanal, but it reminds Solomon Islanders of the problem of unexploded ordinance—a danger that remains to this day. This critique was made by a Solomon Islander who, as reported in the Global Times,^[20] responded to US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy’s declaration: ‘We’re coming back’ with the words, ‘But for what?’

Despite the tendency of the Australian and American publics to view our World War II engagement in the region positively—with Australian tales of the Kokoda Trail or the US focus on the battle of Guadalcanal—the conflicts of the past provide ammunition for China’s anti-colonialist barbs.

Recent events in New Caledonia show the Chinese state delivers these barbs selectively. Faced with the chance to back an anti-colonial struggle against a power that only last year criticised China’s ‘new imperialism’,[21] China’s media has gone deathly silent. Less than a year after mocking Macron for suggesting independence in New Caledonia could mean “a Chinese naval base tomorrow,”[22] the Global Times has posted just a single, neutral sentence to accompany a photo: “Law enforcement still on the front lines on May 19, 2024 around Magenta Tower where law enforcement and rioters clashed throughout Saturday night into Sunday in Noumea, New Caledonia.”[23] While neighbouring Vanuatu rails against ‘the unfinished business of decolonisation’, China’s state media has chosen to look away.

Unlike China, Australian and US governments cannot direct their companies to invest in the region, even though this is what Pacific leaders from Rabuka to Marape are most keen on (Telstra’s purchase of Digicel Pacific is the lonely exception^[24]). While much ink has been spilt on the leverage provided by China’s ‘sky high debts’,^[25] the source of Beijing’s sway over Pacific leaders is past and present investment and the promise of future projects. Qian Bo, China’s abrasive Special Envoy to the Pacific, is known to regale his Pacific counterparts with derisory observations about Australia’s economy and its inability to meet the Pacific’s needs, either as a destination for Pacific exports or as a source of investment.

Although China’s Pacific aid has plateaued since 2016,^[26] China grounds its critique of other powers competing for influence in the region in its self-image as a developing nation, the provider of ‘South–South cooperation’ rather than ‘aid’. On this front, Australia has a history of jumping at shadows. In 2021 the then Foreign Minister Marise Payne flew to Daru in Papua New Guinea in response to a (highly unlikely) proposed Chinese state-backed investment in a fish-processing plant on Australia’s northern border. After this, China’s representatives in Papua New Guinea suddenly started to mention the project in their talking points, having previously said nothing about it. With some glee, the Global Times cited a Facebook post by local governor Taboi Awi Yoto in the wake of her visit, claiming Australia wants ‘us to be subsistence farmers and fishermen and maintain the status quo’.^[27] With a bit of due diligence, the fuss could have been avoided. There was a reason MOFCOM had said nothing about the project. The company, which consisted of a couple of guys from Fujian kicking around Port Moresby, had no capacity to get the project off the ground.

The uptick in Australia’s diplomatic relations with China might offer some protection from China’s envoys snarking about Australia’s colonial history, but China’s political winds can change quickly. The best way to brace for a future narrative assault on Australia’s Pacific history is to deal with it honestly, make reparations where appropriate, and encourage the United States, the United Kingdom and France to do the same. More importantly, Australia should continue on the path of becoming a nation that looks more like the Pacific. When Australian history becomes Pacific history, doing right by the region will not seem such a big ask.

Notes

^[1] CGTN Global Watch, 9 July 2023, online at: https://twitter.com/GlobalWatchCGTN/status/1677950717695254531

^[2] CGTN, Exclusive with Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare, 15 July 2023, online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4i4xABX-x4

^[3] Xinhua, ‘Xi Jinping: China’s policy on Pacific Island countries adheres to the “Four Fully Respects”’ 习近平：中国的太平洋岛国政策秉持’四个充分尊重’, Gov.cn, 10 July 2023, online at:  https://www.gov.cn/yaowen/liebiao/202307/content_6890928.htm

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Susannah Luthi, ‘Meth, vanilla and “gulags”: How China has overtaken the South Pacific one island at a time’, Politico, 29 August 2021, online at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/29/tonga-china-south-pacific-influence-506370. Taina Kami Enoka, ‘China insists Tonga loans come with “no political strings attached”’, Guardian, 29 June 2022, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/china-tonga-loans-no-political-strings-attached-pacific

^[6] Most Pacific nations refer to their strategies of engaging with China – and Asia more broadly – as the ‘Look North’ policy.

^[7] Graeme Smith, George Carter, Mao Xiaojing, Almah Tararia, Elisi Tupou and Xu Weitao, The Development Needs of Pacific Island Countries, Beijing: UNDP China, 2014.

^[8] Denghua Zhang, ‘Pacific studies in China: Policies, structure and research’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 55, no. 1 (2020), 80–96.

^[9] Shandong is one of three provinces heavily involved in distant-water fishing. Graeme Smith, ‘Fishy business: China’s mixed signals on sustainable fisheries’, in Linda Jaivin and Esther Sunkyung Klein with Sharon Strange (eds), China Story Yearbook: Contradiction, Canberra: ANU Press, 2022, p. 220.

^[10] See for example Shuo Luan, ‘Chinese pacificism: Exploring Chinese news media representation of Pacific island countries’, Pacific Studies, vol. 45, no. 2 (2022), 157–86.

^[11] Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty, November 2023, online at: https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/tuvalu/australia-tuvalu-falepili-union-treaty

^[12] Jessica Marinaccio, ‘The Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union: Tuvaluan values or Australian interests?’, DevPolicy blog, 15 November 2023, online at: https://devpolicy.org/the-australia-tuvalu-falepili-union-tuvaluan-values-or-australian-interests-20231115/

^[13] Editor, ‘Do not make the resettlement offer to Pacific a geopolitical chess move’, Global Times, 14 November 2023, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202311/1301824.shtml

^[14] Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop and Echo Hui, ‘Australia revokes Chinese scholar visas and targets media officials, prompting furious China response’, ABC News, 9 September 2020, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/chinese-scholars-have-visas-revoked-as-diplomatic-crisis-grows/12644022

^[15] Kyle Hill, ‘The Castle Bravo disaster’, youtube.com, 23 January 2021, online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew064gt2thY

^[16] Nic Maclellan, Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons: A Pacific Priority, Melbourne: ICANW, online at: https://icanw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Pacific-Report-2017.pdf

^[17] Stephen Howes, ‘The Opposition’s opposition to the Pacific Engagement Visa’, DevPolicy blog, 8 March 2023, online at: https://devpolicy.org/the-oppositions-opposition-to-the-pacific-engagement-visa-20230308/

^[18] Stephen Dziedzic and Dubravka Voloder, ‘Parliament clears path for Pacific visa and opens the door to 3,000 annual immigrants’, ABC News, 19 October 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-19/labor-expands-pacific-immigration-with-new-visa/102997646

^[19] Bruce Hunt, Australia’s Northern Shield? Papua New Guinea and the Defence of Australia since 1880, Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2017.

^[20] Frank Sade Bilaupaine, ‘US geopolitical point-scoring means little to Pacific Island countries’, Global Times, 4 August 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272183.shtml

[21] Guardian staff and agencies, Emmanuel Macron denounces ‘new imperialism’ in Pacific on historic visit to Vanuatu, The Guardian, 27 July 2023, online at:   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/27/emmanuel-macron-vanuata-visit-pacific-imperialism

[22] GT staff, Macron’s ‘new imperialism’ narrative ‘an empty concept and desperate effort’ to save France’s marginalized status in South Pacific: experts. Global Times, 28 July 2023, online at:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1295252.shtml

[23] VGC, Chaotic Aftermath. Global Times, 19 May 2024, online at:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202405/1312600.shtml

^[24] Renju Jose, ‘Australia’s Telstra completes Digicel Pacific buyout’, Reuters, 14 July 2022, online at: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/australias-telstra-completes-digicel-pacific-buyout-2022-07-14/

^[25] Alexandre Dayant, Meg Keen and Roland Rajah, ‘Chinese aid to the Pacific: Decreasing, but not disappearing’, Lowy Interpreter, 23 January 2023, online at: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/chinese-aid-pacific-decreasing-not-disappearing

^[26] Ibid.

^[27] Editor, ‘Canberra’s arrogance won’t block planned fishery project’, Global Times, 27 January 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214169.shtml

The post The Frontiers of History: China Discovers the Pacific’s Dark Colonial Legacy appeared first on The China Story.

As years passed, Sydney’s original Chinatown no longer served as a community hub, gradually becoming a cultural attraction for local and international visitors alike. At the same time, Burwood grew to become one of the suburbs where large numbers of the Chinese diaspora live, along with Sydney’s Chatswood and Melbourne’s Box Hill.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 48.8 percent of the population in Burwood is of Chinese ancestry, with 29.9 percent born in China.^[2] With 16.6 percent of the population aged 25 to 29 years, more than three times higher than the New South Wales average, the suburb is dominated not just by recent migrants from mainland China but also by students and young working professionals.^[3] The demographic skew of Burwood has led to its vibrant Chinatown and paved the way for one of the most rapidly developed sectors in Australia: online food delivery.

Since 2016, the online food delivery sector has gone through exponential growth in Australia, accelerated by COVID-19 lockdowns. In 2023, the sector recorded AU$1.3 billion in revenue, up 180 percent over seven years, despite an ongoing cost of living crisis in the country.^[4] Yet the market is highly concentrated in the hands of a few multinational companies. After the exit of UK-based delivery giant Deliveroo in November 2022 citing tough competition,^[5] Australia’s food delivery market was left with three big players: UberEats (54.5 percent), Australia-founded Menulog (27.5 percent) and DoorDash (15.0 percent). Other players make up 3 percent.^[6] Both UberEats and DoorDash originated in Silicon Valley.

At Burwood Chinatown, every food vendor collaborates with food delivery platforms, evident from the colourful placards of delivery platform logos at their counters and from the large posse of delivery riders in yellow or blue jackets and helmets standing and waiting in front of the food stalls, scrolling their phones, with their vehicles parked outside the plaza. However, the platforms that dominate Burwood Chinatown are not from Silicon Valley or Australia but two Asian food delivery apps: HungryPanda 熊猫外卖, which originated in the UK, and Fantuan 饭团, which originated in Canada. HungryPanda offers a choice of languages, including English, Chinese (a choice of simplified or traditional characters), Japanese and Korean, while Fantuan offers choices of English, French and Chinese (simplified or traditional characters). Despite the language options, the two platforms are dominated by Chinese-language users.

Like the physical, concrete Chinatowns that served as a one-stop community hub for the Chinese diaspora, these food delivery apps have shaped the daily experience of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Australia, especially during the pandemic. However, these delivery apps face distinctive challenges as Chinese diaspora-oriented digital platforms operating in the West, including questions about the treatment of their delivery drivers and the sustainability of the diaspora economy.

The non-Silicon Valley apps born in the West

Launched in 2017, HungryPanda was first created in the United Kingdom by former Chinese international student Eric Liu, who saw the potential of developing an online Chinese food delivery platform tailored to the needs of the Chinese diaspora community in Britain.^[7] The platform expanded to France and New Zealand the following year, and in 2019 it was launched in the United States and Australia. As the app expanded, it incorporated more cuisines and languages, with Asian food as its core business. The app has also attracted venture capital, including US$130 million in its Series D funding round in 2021. Today, HungryPanda claims more than six million users worldwide, partnering with more than 100,000 merchants and 80,000 delivery riders.

Despite its achievements, HungryPanda did not have a smooth start in Australia, as the country had had its own online Asian food delivery app, EASI, since 2014.^[8] The Melbourne-based business claimed it had 1.5 million Australian users, worked with around 20,000 vendors and partnered with 25,000 delivery riders.^[9] In March 2022, HungryPanda acquired EASI for AU$50 million, making it a leading player in specialist online food delivery service, available in nine cities and towns.

But the same month the HungryPanda–EASI deal was completed, a Canadian Chinese food delivery app also entered the Australian market. Fantuan was founded in 2014 in Vancouver, where almost 20 percent of the population are of Chinese heritage.^[10] Besides Canada and Australia, the app is also available in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its Australian business mainly operates in Sydney and Melbourne. In December 2023, Fantuan secured US$40 million in Series C funding from a US grocery e-commerce company as well as investors from the United States and China.^[11] The deal, along with HungryPanda’s in 2021, shows optimism from the sector about the potential of these Asian food delivery platforms and confidence in consumers from diaspora communities.

Despite roots in the West, HungryPanda and Fantuan are on a different path from Silicon Valley rivals such as Uber and Doordash. They built their businesses by specifically offering Chinese diaspora communities modern, authentic Chinese food that tastes like home. Their focus on offering services in Chinese won them loyalty from new migrants and international students still adapting to an English-speaking environment. Their growing number of users in turn helped them accumulate an increasingly long list of Chinese food vendors that also rely on the specific customer groups targeted by these delivery apps. They grew strongly during the COVID-19 lockdowns when dining out was impossible.

As elsewhere, following their initial success, they expanded their focus in Australia from Chinese food to Asian cuisine more broadly as well as local fast food chains. As specialist delivery apps they proactively court restaurants well known in the communities with the hope of being the first one to secure contracts—especially exclusivity contracts—with the restaurants, according to the food vendors I talked to.^[12] Like their Silicon Valley competitors, which expanded their delivery services to grocery shopping, both HungryPanda and Fantuan have launched similar services for Asian grocery stores. In Burwood, one Asian gourmet snack shop that sells bags of marinated duck neck and other traditional Chinese snacks told me they joined these two delivery platforms ‘for convenience’, as ‘everyone is using them now’. They also actively support community events and traditional cultural festivals through sponsorships and advertising.^[13]

A stepping stone for new migrants

In a Hong Kong café in Burwood, Joe and Qing (not their real names) sat with me after they finished their deliveries for the day. It was the winter of 2023, and both Joe and Qing had heard predictions of extreme heat in the upcoming months. Joe recalled that a couple of years before, during a hot summer in Sydney, he suffered damaging sunburn on his face even though he had applied sunscreen and covered his face while doing his deliveries.

Both men were in their fifties and spoke Mandarin with a strong Malaysian accent. Although news reports often describe food delivery riders as young international students and backpackers on working holiday visas,^[14] a proportion of riders for these specialist delivery apps are middle-aged men like Joe and Qing who came to Australia to support their families in Malaysia, China or Taiwan. However, the size of the proportion remains unknown as there is no accurate data available. As Australia does not offer low-skill work visas, some of the riders I talked to were in complicated ‘visa-hopping’ situations in which they secure and keep their work rights through various types of temporary visa. Their visa conditions plus their poor English skills limited their employment options to farm work and other low-skill jobs. Food delivery became their stepping stone to other work.^[15] The process of becoming a food delivery rider is simple: download the app, sign the job application, demonstrate valid work rights in Australia and go through road safety training on the app. Chinese-language delivery apps like HungryPanda and Fantuan are the first choice for newly arrived migrants with limited proficiency in English. Unlike international students, whose work hours are capped as part of their student visa requirements, riders like Joe and Qing deliver food as a full-time job with no limits on working hours. Many riders sign up for several platforms as they are considered contractors, not employees.

As a full-time rider, Joe told me that during the pandemic—when there was a huge shortage of migrant workers as a result of the border closures—he could earn around AU$300 for eight hours of work. Income consists of delivery fees from each order plus bonuses from the platforms for reaching a certain number of orders. Both Joe and Qing came to Australia with the hope of making more money than staying at home. Their incomes as delivery riders in Australia could not only cover their daily expenses but also support their families in Malaysia.

But making a living as riders can be challenging. Because not all orders are of the same value, to maximise their income, many riders will take several orders at a time. They might engage in ‘order-grabbing’ 抢单, by which, in addition to the orders allocated to them, riders also lay claim to unallocated orders while still in transit. Order grabbing has sparked concerns about road safety, as many riders were found scrolling their phones while riding on the road. In an interview with me, HungryPanda confirmed that they no longer allow riders to take unallocated orders along the way. They also confirmed that they have adopted a computerised system to allocate orders that avoids unfair arrangements, with human coordinators stepping in when the riders report an error.

Despite all these measures, road safety for delivery riders has been a major concern in Australia, with at least 13 riders killed on the roads since 2017 and frequent major accidents.^[16] The need to complete the delivery within the required time to avoid penalties and get new orders is the main reason riders take risks on the roads.^[17] Riders and labour advocates also raise questions about the speed and simplicity of the sign-up procedures.^[18] When fatal accidents occur, the employment status of delivery riders as contractors makes it difficult for victims’ families to seek compensation from delivery platforms. In September 2020, HungryPanda delivery rider Xiaojun Chen died on the job in Sydney. After a two-year legal battle, his widow was finally granted AU$830,000 compensation.^[19] The landmark case later pushed HungryPanda, UberEats and other key food delivery players to announce stricter road safety policies, to launch mandatory safety training sessions for new riders and to extend riders’ insurance schemes.

In October 2023, in the wake of the Labor government passing new workplace legislation that imposes minimum wage standards on gig work, Uber warned that customers would have to pay 85 percent more for food deliveries, although commentators said the claim demonstrated how badly they were underpaying their delivery riders.^[20] In February 2024, Parliament approved the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act, which said that gig workers could receive minimum wages if they demonstrate that they are engaged under a services contract and work for a digital platform with low bargaining power under the contract.^[21]

While the Closing Loopholes Act sparked hopes among delivery riders for improving their working conditions, for many of them, it is too difficult to advocate for themselves in conflicts with delivery platforms. Some of them have joined the Transport Workers’ Union—the national advocacy organisation for transport workers – to defend their rights, including around safe practices. There have been protests and organised meetings with the delivery apps management, and the union has helped members to lodge fair work dismissals.

But mobilising workers unfamiliar with Australia’s legal system comes with challenges. Joe and Qing, who are both members of the Transport Workers’ Union, told me they had ‘very positive’ experiences with the union. When the union organised protests, they would share the information in the WeChat groups with other delivery riders, but only a few would end up joining them.^[22] In my interview with the National Secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union, Michael Kaine, he told me his organisation actively approached migrant workers to support them.^[23] However, due to the fact that they were constantly on the road, it was challenging to mobilise them compared to those who work in the physical venues.

The sustainability of diaspora economy

Despite being created for the Chinese diaspora community, delivery apps like HungryPanda and Fantuan have so far avoided the ownership and data-sharing controversies that dog TikTok. While they were to some extent inspired by the success of China’s own food delivery apps Meituan 美团 and E Le Ma 饿了吗,^[24] both HungryPanda and Fantuan were founded in Western countries in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom and Canada. Although they have investors from China, their influence is limited in comparison to TikTok’s Beijing parent ByteDance.

But these specialist delivery apps might face consequences from changes in immigration policies. In December 2023, the Australian Government released a migration review that set higher barriers for international students to stay after graduation and cracked down on the abuse of student visas as a pathway to work in Australia. The review also targeted the phenomena of ‘visa-hopping’—a tactic that several of my interviewees have adopted in order to keep working in Australia legally – to prevent visa applicants from exploiting the temporary visa system.^[25] It remains unknown to what extent the new migration review will affect the supply of delivery riders—where the majority of them are visa holders—in Australia. Noticeably, due to the rise of cost of living, there has been an increase of English-speaking delivery riders using and joining HungryPanda, even though the app’s primary language option is Chinese.^[26] The surge echoes the growing trend of Australians working two or more jobs—including food delivery—to ease their financial burdens amid the continuous rises of interest rate in 2022 and 2023.^[27] As government policies gradually put in place while Australia’s per capita recession is estimated to extend, there may be significant changes in the future of both delivery riders in Australia and the sector.^[28]

Notes

^[1] Burwood Chinatown, ‘Our story’, Burwood Chinatown homepage, retrieved 29 March 2024, online at: https://burwoodchinatown.com.au/

^[2] Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘2021 Burwood (NSW)’, ABS, 2021, online at: https://abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/120031678

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] IBIS World, ‘Online food ordering and delivery platforms in Australia – market size, industry analysis, trends and forecasts (2024–2029)’, IBIS World, August 2023, online at: https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-food-ordering-delivery-platforms/5538/#IndustryStatisticsAndTrends

^[5] Praveen Menon, ‘Britain’s Deliveroo exits Australia, citing tough competition’, Reuters, 16 November 2022, online at: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/britains-deliveroo-exits-australia-citing-tough-competition-2022-11-16/

^[6] IBIS World, ‘Online food ordering and delivery platforms in Australia’.

^[7] HungryPanda, ‘About us’, HungryPanda, retrieved 29 March 2024, online at: https://www.hungrypanda.co/

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Anthony Macdonald and Kanika Sood, ‘UK’s HungryPanda buys Melbourne food delivery business Easi’, Australian Financial Review, 10 January 2022, online at: https://www.afr.com/street-talk/uk-s-hungry-panda-buys-melbourne-food-delivery-business-easi-20220109-p59mwb

^[10] Justin McElroy, ‘Majority of metro Vancouver residents now identify as visible minority, census data shows’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 26 October 2022, online at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/2021-census-minority-demographics-metro-vancouver-bc-1.6630164

^[11] Fantuan, ‘Fantuan raises $40 million series C round, led by e-commerce platform GrubMarket’, PR Newswire, 5 December 2023, online at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fantuan-raises-40-million-series-c-round-led-by-e-commerce-platform-grubmarket-302006255.html

^[12] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia: They worked hard during the pandemic, then got replaced by new immigrants during post-COVID’ 澳洲華裔送餐員：疫情時用命搏，疫情後卻被新移民取代, Initium Media 端傳媒, 29 September 2023, online at: https://theinitium.com/article/20230929-international-delivering-food-in-austrilia

^[13] HungryPanda, ‘HungryPanda supports Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in Australia’ 熊猫外卖HugryPanda助力澳大利亚端午节活动, HungryPanda, 24 June 2023, online at: https://www.hungrypanda.co/zh-hans/hungrypanda-xszq/

^[14] Lydia Feng, ‘Death of latest Sydney food delivery rider Adil Abbas prompts calls for reforms to overseas licence rules’, ABC News, 21 August 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-21/calls-nsw-driver-licence-reform-after-delivery-rider-death/102746298

^[15] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[16] Edwina Storie, ‘“I can barely survive.” We ask delivery riders if they feel safe on the job’, SBS News, 28 August 2023, online at: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/i-can-barely survive-we-ask-delivery-riders-if-they-feel-safe-on-the-job/qd8wysl06

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Samantha Hawley and Lydia Feng, ‘The delivery riders at risk for your dinner’, ABC News Daily, 7 September 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-delivery-riders-at-risk-for-your-dinner/102823264

^[19] Isabel Roe and Issac Nowroozi, ‘Family of food delivery driver Xiaojun Chen, who died at work, granted $830k compensation’, ABC News, 23 June 2022, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-23/compensation-for-xiaojun-chen-food-delivery-driver-died-on-job/101176062

^[20] Jordyn Beazley, ‘Uber warning that food delivery prices could spike 85% shows gig workers are underpaid, experts say’, Guardian, 17 October 2023, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/uber-warning-of-85-meal-hikes-under-labors-new-laws-shows-how-underpaid-gig-workers-are-experts-say

^[21] Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, ‘Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act 2023’, Australian Government, 26 February 2024, online at: https://www.dewr.gov.au/closing-loopholes

^[22] Jason Om, ‘This food delivery rider spoke up against Hungry Panda. Then they called the police on her’, ABC News, 18 March 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-18/food-delivery-rider-spoke-up-against-hungry-panda/103561144

^[23] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[24] Fantuan, ‘Fantuan raises $40 million series C round’.

^[25] Nick McKenzie et al., ‘Trafficked’, Age, November 2023, online at: https://www.theage.com.au/topic/trafficked-6frg

^[26] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[27] Greg Jericho, ‘A record number of Australians are now working more than one job to make ends meet’, Australia Institute, 8 September 2023, online at: https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/in-the-past-year-the-number-of-people-working-more-than-one-job-has-risen-7/

^[28] Michael Janda, ‘“Tepid” GDP extends Australia’s per capita recession, hinting November’s interest rate rise may have been “unnecessary”’, ABC News, 6 March 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-06/gdp-december-quarter-2023-meets-low-expectations/103553062

The post Stepping Stone for Migrants? The Reality of Chinese Food Delivery Apps in Australia appeared first on The China Story.

The incident gained global attention after Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee 李家超 and Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Kevin Yeung 楊潤雄reacted furiously to the international soccer icon’s failure to play, blaming the organisers.[3] Certain pro-Beijing Hong Kong politicians, including Regina Ip 葉劉淑儀 and Junius Ho 何君堯, sought to escalate the incident by accusing Messi of disrespecting not just soccer fans but also ‘making the chief executive “lose face” and insulting the SAR government ’. [4] Nationalistic sentiments ran even hotter after Messi took to the field in a game against Japan just two days later. This led Junius Ho to accuse him of ‘insulting China’ by playing in a country that had carried out atrocities in China, such as the Nanjing Massacre in 1937.[5] Regina Ip even demanded that ‘Messi should never be allowed to return to Hong Kong’.[6]

Advancing from stability to prosperity

In 2019, millions of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest against an extradition bill that would allow the possibility of a mainland trial for people in Hong Kong. One year later, the PRC imposed a National Security Law on the territory that put many protesters and journalists in prison, shut down free media and broke up a number of unions and other associations. Two years after that, Xi Jinping announced during the Twentieth National Congress in September 2022 that Hong Kong had entered a ‘new stage in which it has restored order and is set to thrive’ 進入由亂到治走向由治及興的新階段.[7] Since then, the Hong Kong government has been actively promoting the narrative of ‘advancing from stability to prosperity’ 由治及興. The central idea is that despite ‘the impact of the epidemic and the social unrest previously’, the city has now ‘transited from chaos to order’ and is now enjoying prosperity with ‘better constitutional order and improved governance systems’, under the leadership of the Hong Kong government and the support received from the motherland.[8] The government has continually reiterated this rhetoric, particularly after the legislation of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (commonly known as Basic Law Article 23).[9]

To substantiate this narrative, the Hong Kong government has launched various new campaigns aimed at enhancing the city’s international profile, showcasing its reputation as a top international destination. For example, the Hong Kong International Airport World of Winners campaign distributes free tickets across a range of airlines for lucky winners to visit Hong Kong.[10] With sponsorship from Hong Kong companies, the government organised Night Vibes Hong Kong during the Mid-Autumn Festival and Christmas celebrations to showcase the city’s vibrant nightlife after COVID-19.[11] In 2024, apart from sponsoring the Inter Miami exhibition game in February, the government has announced plans for monthly fireworks displays and drone shows above Victoria Harbour to boost tourism.[12]

Despite the government’s efforts and massive advertising campaigns, not all the mega events went smoothly as planned. Night Vibes suffered from power outages in the first few days.[13] One day before Hong Kong was set to host the FIA (Fédération International de l’Automobile) World Rallycross Championship Season Finale for the first time in November 2023, the organiser announced a shortened schedule and racing track on the first day owing to construction delays.[14] Poor transport arrangements for the 2024 New Year’s Eve fireworks left 1,500 mainland tourists waiting long hours – in some cases all night – for coaches home.[15]

When Messi’s visit proved a public relations disaster instead of a triumph, the Hong Kong government was eager to point the finger at the winner of the multiple Ballon d’Or himself. However, local press in Hong Kong have since questioned the credibility of the event’s host, Tatler Asia, and why the government sponsored the event for HK$16 million, exceeding the HK$15 million limit for one major sports event stipulated in the 2023 Budget. Tatler Asia is a luxury fashion and lifestyle publisher that has favourably covered the career of Victoria Beckham, wife of the owner of Inter Miami, David Beckham, but the company had never before organised a major sports event.^[16]

Just one week later, the Lunar New Year Cup 賀歲盃, a soccer tradition in Hong Kong since 1908, proceeded smoothly, with Rivaldo, Alessandro Del Piero, David Villa and Francesco Totti in attendance. There were few complaints.

Soccer fans in Hong Kong were certainly disappointed by Messi’s absence from the match. Ignoring the fact that Messi had an injury and that injuries happen in soccer, some demanded a refund for their tickets. This happened even during the game itself.[17] But many perceived the Hong Kong government’s response to be an overreaction. Local netizens shared the humorous meme: ‘It’s all because you’re pessimistic, unlike me who can see the benefits of “advancing from stability to prosperity”’ 咁係因為你悲觀, 我見到由治及興嘅好處.[18] The meme, which originated from LIHKG, a popular Hong Kong online forum, has been circulating since April 2023 to make fun of the government’s new political slogan ‘advancing from stability to prosperity’. It is often invoked in response to unfortunate events in Hong Kong, such as the perceivable economic decline, ironically urging Hongkongers to have faith in their local government and the motherland.

Nationalistic overdrive

Local disappointment turned into nationalistic fury in mainland China, especially after Messi’s subsequent appearance on the pitch in Japan. ‘Patriotic’ Chinese netizens shared comments from people like Kenneth Fok, Junius Ho and Regina Ip, demanding that Messi ‘give Chinese people an explanation’ 给中国人民一个交代 and calling for a nationwide boycott of Messi’s games, teams and related products.[19] Angry fans flooded Messi’s and Inter Miami’s social media accounts demanding refunds and an apology;[20] some burnt Messi’s jerseys; some even targeted the website of the Argentine Embassy in China and declared the Falkland Islands to be ‘a sacred and indivisible territory of the United Kingdom’.[21] On 9 February, five days after the Hong Kong exhibition game, the Hangzhou Sports Office issued a statement citing ‘obvious reasons’ for cancelling a friendly match with the Argentinian national team in March 2024.[22] Such reactions highlight the increasing integration of Hong Kong’s affairs with those of China and show that a local incident in the territory can influence international relations.

On 19 February, the anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Argentina, Messi’s social media account on Weibo posted a video in which he denied having any political reasons for not playing in Hong Kong while playing two days later in Japan, stressing ‘his close and special relationship’ with China.[23] Netizens’ reactions were mixed: some people had enough of the drama, some said he should have released the video sooner, others complained that he did not really ‘apologise’. Some quoted a Weibo post from 8 February by Hu Xijin’s 胡錫進, the former editor of the Global Times and an early ‘wolf warrior’–style commentator, stating that the matter ‘should not be politicised’ and denigrating Messi as ‘not that influential’.[24] By contrast, Kenneth Fok’s furious response has received blowback on the Mainland, with some labelling him a ‘political opportunist’ 政治投机.[25]

The Hong Kong government’s fury at an injured Messi’s failure to play at a friendly exhibition game must be understood in the context of the government’s fervent desire to restore Hong Kong’s image as an international city, under the narrative of ‘advancing from stability to prosperity’. Since the 2019 protests, crackdown and imposition of the National Security Law, some Western commentators have argued that Hong Kong ‘is struggling to restore its image as a global city’.[26] Even mainland netizens joke that Hong Kong has become the ruins of an international financial centre 國際金融中心遺址.[27] Yet, for all the controversy and ensuing reactions, the fact that such a high-profile figure as Messi visited Hong Kong in the first place – and the widespread international attention paid to the incident – affirms the city’s global significance. Nevertheless, the Hong Kong government’s overreaction and hyperbolic rhetoric from certain Hong Kong politicians that ‘Messi is not just hurting the feeling of Hong Kong people but also insulting China’ illustrate the city’s growing integration with mainland China in its own perception as well as that of the world.

Notes

[1] Peggy Ye and Pak Yiu, ‘Lionel Messi no-show angers Hong Kong authorities and fans’, Nikkei, 5 February 2024, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sports/Lionel-Messi-no-show-angers-Hong-Kong-authorities-and-fans.

[2] Kenneth Fok, ‘On “Inter Miami” and “King of Soccer” Messi’, Facebook, 7 February 2024, https://www.facebook.com/FokKaiKong/posts/pfbid02CF5PRLmNh9ovJD8vKPUbenagfrZqae5uepYGK6CjfsoRzjfx47SdNbEs2w9f1RQzl.

[3] ‘Govt sought remedies over sit-out’, news.gov.hk, 5 February 2024, https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2024/02/20240205/20240205_124118_490.html; ‘Organiser should explain sit-out: CE’, news.gov.hk, 6 February 2024, https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2024/02/20240206/20240206_101337_541.html.

[4] Junius Ho Kwan Yiu, ‘Contradiction between ourselves and the enemy’ 敵我矛盾, Facebook, 8 February 2024, https://www.facebook.com/JuniusHoKwanYiu/posts/1143928760545224?ref=embed_post.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Regina Ip Lau Suk Yee (@ReginaIplau), ‘Messi should never be allowed to return to Hong Kong’, X, 8 February 2024, https://x.com/ReginaIplau/status/1755239462605553874.

[7] Xi Jinping, ‘Hold high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and strive in unity to build a modern socialist country in all respects’ 高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜 为全面建设社会主义现代化国家而团结奋斗, Gov.cn, 25 October 2024, https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2022-10/25/content_5721685.htm.

[8] Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, ‘Build a solid foundation for security while upholding the principle and leveraging the advantages of “one country, two systems”‘, The Chief Executive’s 2022 Policy Address, 2022, https://www.policyaddress.gov.hk/2022/en/p7.html.

[9] John Lee, ‘Safeguarding National Security Ordinance has become effective, fulfilling the historical mission’  維護國安條例生效 完成歷史使命, news.gov.hk, 3 March 2024, https://www.news.gov.hk/chi/2024/03/20240323/20240323_170428_609.html.

[10] ‘Hong Kong International Airport World of Winners’, Hong Kong International Airport, 2023, https://wow.hongkongairport.com/lang/en/tickets/.

[11] ‘About “Night Vibes Hong Kong”‘, September 2023, https://www.nightvibeshk.gov.hk/en/about.html.

[12] Hong Kong Special Administration Region, ‘Building the Hong Kong brand on all fronts’, The 2024–25 Budget, 2024, https://www.budget.gov.hk/2024/eng/budget10.html.

[13] Wynna Wong, ‘“Night vibes Hong Kong”: Hundreds flock to Wan Chai bazaar but power supply glitches zap event energy’, South China Morning Post, 27 September 2023, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3236031/night-vibes-hong-kong-hundreds-flock-wan-chai-bazaar-power-supply-glitches-zap-event-energy.

[14] ‘Fans express disappointment at FIA race arrangements’, rthk.hk, 11 November 2023, https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1727428-20231111.htm.

[15] ‘Govt criticized for inadequate traffic arrangements after New Year’s Eve’s fireworks display’, Standard, 1 January 2024, https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/211955/Govt-criticized-for-inadequate-traffic-arrangements-after-New-Year%27s-Eve%27s-fireworks-display.

[16] ‘Controversy over Messi’s trip to Hong Kong is difficult to resolve’ 美斯香港行爭議難平, HK01, 9 February 2024, https://www.hk01.com/.

[17] ‘The Consumer Council received 245 complaints involving $1.6 million, and some passengers sought compensation for air tickets and hotel expenses’ 消委會接245宗投訴涉款160萬 有旅客追討機票酒店費用, HKTKWW, 6 February 2024, https://www.tkww.hk/a/202402/06/AP65c1a611e4b0eb64da03c720.html/.

[18] ‘Messi’s performance in Hong Kong was “unfortunate”‘ 美斯: 香港情況「不幸」, LIHKG, 6 February 2024, https://lihkg.com/thread/3621122/page/1.

[19] For example: Junius Ho Kwan Yiu, ‘Contradiction between us and the enemy’ 敌我矛盾, Weibo, 8 February 2024, https://weibo.com/3471850792/NFKUfb0dG; Chongfeng haojiao, ‘Messi should never be allowed to come to Hong Kong again”‘绝不应该允许梅西再来香港, Weibo, 8 February 2024, https://weibo.com/2343014623/NFDubl9Q2.

[20] ‘From pitch to politics: About the messy Messi affair in Hong Kong’, What’s on Weibo, 17 February 2024, https://www.whatsonweibo.com/from-pitch-to-politics-about-the-messy-messi-affair-in-hong-kong/

[21] ‘Dissatisfied with Messi’s insult to China, Chinese netizens flooded to the Argentinian embassy’s Weibo and left messages: Falkland Islands belong to British’ 不滿梅西辱華 陸網民湧阿國使館微博留言: 福克蘭群島英國的, Economic Daily, 11 February 2024, https://money.udn.com/money/story/5603/7765774.

[22] Da He Bao, ‘Argentinian soccer trip to Hangzhou is cancelled’ 阿根廷杭州行取消, Weibo, 10 February 2024, https://weibo.com/1734530730/4999623037160812.

[23] Lionel Messi, ‘Good luck in the Year of Dragon’ 龙年大吉, Weibo, 20 February 2024, https://weibo.com/5934019851/O1m9styT4.

[24] Hu Xijin, ‘Old Hu supports criticism of Messi’s performance in Hong Kong’ 老胡支持批梅西的香港表现, Weibo, 8 February 2024, https://m.weibo.cn/status/4999238310695484.

[25] ‘The Messi incident may be reversed’ 梅西事件或将反转, Sohu, 23 February 2024, https://www.sohu.com/a/759684676_120915036.

[26] ‘Hong Kong is struggling to restore its image as a global city’, Economist, 15 February 2024, https://www.economist.com/china/2024/02/15/hong-kong-is-struggling-to-restore-its-image-as-a-global-city.

[27] ‘Where did the narrative of “the ruins of an international financial centre” come from?’「國際金融中心遺址」說法從何而來?, Headline Daily, 2 December 2023, https://www.stheadline.com/realtime-finance.

The post How Did Messi Offend the Hong Kong Government and ‘Insult’ China? appeared first on The China Story.

The environment in space is very different from that of Earth. The extremes in temperatures, from less than −150 degrees Celcius to more than 150 degrees, the lack of atmospheric pressure, and other issues mean that the margin for error to achieve success is zero. Even the most experienced space powers, the United States and Russia, can fail. Luna 25, Russia’s first probe to the Moon in nearly fifty years, crashed there in August 2023.

The difficulties of space travel are challenging for countries and companies relatively new to the space race. China, during a period of about thirty years, has not just overcome these hurdles but also surpassed many other countries, including Russia, to become the world’s number 2 space power.

Launching rockets

One way to measure the progress China has made is by the number of rocket launches. In the United States, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which put the first people on the Moon, now primarily relies on private companies to launch its spacecraft, including crewed missions. SpaceX is one of the companies doing most of this work for NASA. SpaceX can launch multiple rockets per week, sometimes every day, while having the rocket boosters return to Earth to be refuelled and reused.

In 2022, the United States achieved a total of seventy-four orbital launches, sixty-one by SpaceX; China boasted sixty-four. Far behind was Russia at twenty-one, and fourth was New Zealand’s RocketLab at nine.[2]

SpaceX rockets often take multiple, and in some cases, nearly a hundred satellites into space whereas Chinese rockets usually only carry one or two. This is not because China lacks the capability but because it is sending larger satellites and only one or two can fit. However, China is rapidly developing the capability to do these missions that take multiple satellites, called ride-share.

The Tiangong Space Station: Building in space at speed

Space exploration is not only a hard journey but also a long one. Missions take years to design and develop, and the equipment must be tested, and often the process repeats. It is common for missions to run over time and over budget.

The two issues—time and money—are related. Most costs are related to paying hundreds to thousands of highly skilled people. The longer they work on a project, the more that project will cost. Famously, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope ended up being more than ten years late and US$9 billion over budget.

When the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that it would need six additional major missions to complete China’s first space station, Tiangong 天宮太空站 (literally ‘Heavenly Palace Space Station’), the goal of finishing in one year seemed ambitious. It involved launching and preparing two modules (sections), multiple crewed missions and associated launches. But in the end it only took eleven months, with the space station beginning operation in late October 2022. The Chinese space program is one of the few that not only meets its deadlines but also beats them. In the case of Tiangong, early cooperation and knowledge-sharing with Russia saved China time and effort.

Even when the United States was spending 7–9 percent of its GDP to get the Moon, delays were experienced. China is only the third country to operate its own space station after the United States and USSR/Russia, which has since cooperated on the International Space Station (ISS). However, the ISS is ageing and has an uncertain future. Russia has not committed to partner on it beyond 2024. The United States is planning for private companies to build and operate commercial stations around the Earth that NASA can use.

At the same time, NASA is focusing on the Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon. The Gateway, built and operated with commercial and international partners, will be able to support four astronauts at a time for a few months—much like the International Space Station. It will specialise in research, exploration and resource extraction on the Moon. Russia has said it will build its own. However, it is doubtful that Russia has the financial and other means to do so, especially in light of the Luna 25 failure. They are also planning on collaborating with China on efforts on the Moon, which will further diminish their limited budget. It might eventuate that China has the only national space station orbiting the Earth.

China’s race to the ‘dark side’ of the Moon

Landing on the Moon requires probes to decelerate from tens of thousands of kilometres per hour on leaving Earth’s orbit to thousands of kilometres per hour around the Moon to zero. Adding to the difficulty of a Moon landing, the surface is rocky and the soil fine and adhesive. Just over half of missions to the Moon have succeeded.

Yet the race to the Moon is heating up. Since late 2022, a number of countries have sent probes and satellites to the Moon for the first time including South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand. A private Japanese company, ispace, unsuccessfully attempted a landing while the US company Intuitive Machines will attempt a landing in 2024. India became the fourth country to land on the Moon and operate a rover in August 2023, while Japan became the fifth, with JAXA landing SLIM on the Moon in January 2024.

China was the first country, and is still the only country, to land on the far side of the Moon, sometimes misleadingly called the dark side, as it does receive sunlight; it is called the far side because it always faces away from the Earth. The Moon does one orbit around the Earth every 27.29 days. Since the orbit around Earth occurs at the same rate as its rotation, it means the same side is always facing towards Earth. Likewise, every spot on the Moon has about two weeks of continuous sunlight and daytime, followed by two weeks of continuous night-time and darkness.

What makes landing on the far side tricky, is that if you are facing away from Earth, you cannot see Earth or communicate with it. Landing a probe on the Moon is hard enough, harder when you are cut off from communications. To solve this problem, China launched two satellites in orbit around the Moon to act as communication relays between Earth and the rover.

China has already landed two missions, Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4, on the far side of the Moon. Chang’e 3 conducted experiments including successfully growing plants in a biosphere. Chang’e 4 extracted samples of the Moon’s rocks and soil, and carried them back to Earth—only the third country to do so.

China is planning a mission to the Moon nearly every year for the rest of the decade. Its lunar ambitions will culminate in landing taikonauts (what China calls its astronauts) on the Moon in 2030. Given the current pace, it should have no trouble making the timeline.

The new Moon race—resources in space

The new Moon race centres around the utilisation of resources on the Moon. It started when India’s Chandrayaan-1 discovered vast amounts of water ice there, in particular at the Moon’s South Pole. Through a simple process, water (H₂O) can be broken down into hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂), providing astronauts with water, air and ingredients for rocket fuel. There are other potential fuel sources on the Moon as well—in particular Helium-3: an isotope of Helium. The Helium used to inflate balloons is Helium-4, which has two protons and two neutrons. Helium-3 only has 1 neutron. You can smash, or fuse, a neutron on to it—creating a nuclear fusion reaction, which creates Helium-4 and, more importantly, a lot of energy. It is not yet known whether Helium-3 exists on the Moon, especially in any useful or accessible quantities. China is examining the samples brought back to Earth from Chang’e 4 mission to the Moon for Helium-3.[3]

The weaker gravity on the Moon means spacecraft need less energy to leave the surface of the Moon than to leave Earth: about twenty times less. Take NASA’s new, gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for the Artemis missions, which is bigger than the Saturn V in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the rocket is fuel to lift and fly a lander, along with a tiny amount of fuel to reach the Moon, so there is enough fuel to leave the Moon’s surface.

The possibility of refuelling on the Moon will significantly lessen the limitations of space travel. This is part of a broader discussion around in-situ resource utilization—living off the land, so to speak. By using resources in space, rather than taking them up from here, it will be cheaper and more effective in the long term.

Space exploration and astronomy

The name NASA conjures up images from the Hubble Space Telescope, missions to Mars, and asteroids. Its space and astronomy explorations set it apart from other such bodies, which are focused on human space flight, like building space stations or landing on the Moon.

Increasingly, China has been doing the same. It has its own Mars exploration program, landing its first rover on Mars—Tianwen 天问 (‘Heavenly Questions’)—in February 2021, only the second country to do so after the United States. In late 2024, China is planning to launch its own space telescope: Xuntian 巡天 (‘Heavenly Exploration’).

Telescopes are measured by how big their mirrors are. The bigger the mirror, the more light they can collect. China’s telescope will be nearly the same size as NASA’s Hubble: two metres in diameter compared with Hubble’s 2.4 metres, and therefore will be able to see in similar detail. Its field of view, moreover, will be about 300 times wider than that of the Hubble. It will be capable of taking a highly detailed picture of a much larger area at the same amazing resolution as Hubble.

It will also take a page out of NASA’s playbook. The Hubble Space Telescope is more than thirty years old. The US Space Shuttle program had four missions to Hubble: upgrading, fixing and servicing the space telescope. This kept Hubble at the forefront of science until the shuttle program came to an end. Once it is in orbit, the taikonauts on Tiangong will be able to dock with Xuntian, and therefore service and upgrade Xuntian with the best technology available, keeping it at the forefront of science.

Space telescopes are not the only thing China is building. In 2022, NASA with Johns Hopkins University launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). This probe deliberately crashed into an asteroid to see how much energy could be directed into an asteroid to alter its orbit. It was built so that if an asteroid was heading for Earth, we could divert it, avoiding the sort of impact that put an end to the dinosaurs.

China will launch its own asteroid redirection mission in 2025, a year earlier than originally planned, and to a different asteroid. They will also launch Tianwen-2, which will be sent to an asteroid, land, extract samples and return to Earth—much like Japan’s Hayabusa-2 did in 2020 and NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex did in 2023. These samples have revealed exciting features like amino acids, nucleobases (which go into making DNA) and organic compounds.[4]

China also operates the largest single-dish radio telescope on Earth, the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, nicknamed Tianyan 天眼 (‘Heavenly Eye’). This telescope is built into a natural depression on top of a mountain in remote Pingtang County, Guizhou. In Australia, by way of contrast, the largest single-dish radio telescope is 70 metres in diameter.

Commerce and defense in space

Like the United States, Europe, and Australia, China has commercial and military infrastructure in space, and is massively expanding its footprint there. China is second in spending on space projects and infrastructure, spending nearly four times what Russia spends annually.

SpaceX through its Starlink service, and soon to be joined by Amazon with Kuiper, operates thousands of communications satellites to provide global high-speed internet. China has started building its own rival network this year, called Guo Wang 国网, or ‘National Network’.

Since 2000, China has maintained its own Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)—the generic term for GPS. GPS is the US version of a GNSS network. China’s is BeiDou, Russia operates GLONASS and Europe has Galileo. While all are similar in operation, GPS is still the most accurate. However, due to the importance and dependency of countries on these networks, in particular for defence, they operate their own.

China is also developing cutting edge space technology for government and defense purposes. China has also now built and flown what can only be described as a space drone. In the mid-2010s, Boeing built the X-37B for the US Space Force. Not much is known about it, but it is about a quarter the size of the old US Space Shuttle, can stay in orbit for more than four years and can land remotely.[5]It appears that China has also developed and launched its own space drone to do so.[6] Like the US versions, knowledge of the details of it and its capabilities are limited; however, it is most likely for flying and testing military payloads in orbit.

China will also soon enter the space tourism race. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have built dedicated space vehicles for short tourist flights. SpaceX and Axiom Space have also flown tourists into orbit and to the International Space Station. A Chinese company with mixed private and state ownership (partly funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences), trading as CAS Space in English but actually called Guangzhou Zhongke Aerospace Exploration Technology Co. Ltd 广州中科宇航探索技术有限公司, is developing a system similar to that of Blue Origin: vehicles that will go about 100 kilometres above the surface of Earth for a few minutes before returning.[7] Their aim is to start operations in 2025.

China, Russia and money

With only twenty years since the first Chinese taikonaut ventured into space, how has China caught up? There are a few reasons, two of which are money and Russia. The Russian space program itself, despite its long and proud history, is falling behind. A lack of investment and exciting projects, and a failure to embrace the private sector of the private sector, has meant that Russia is no longer the power in space it used to be. However, it does have the experience and knowledge China has needed.

While China is rapidly developing its own expertise, its space scientists have taken advantage of Russian space heritage since 2000, most notably in the development of China’s Tiangong Space Station. Agreements have led to the sharing of detailed knowledge, classified information, and technical advice.[8]As a result, Russia’s scientists and space program can work on exciting projects, at the forefront of space exploration, without footing the whole bill. The two countries have worked on twenty missions together already.[9]

Just as the United States spent more than US$180 billion (in today’s dollars) during the Apollo era, China is now rapidly increasing its spending, on space exploration and infrastructure. In 2020, it spent around US$10 billion, and in 2022, it spent US$12 billion.[10] As a result of investment and cooperation, China has now surpassed Russia in all measures of space exploration. When looking at the amount, sophistication and sheer variety of missions and programs China is leading compared to Russia, it is clear who the number 2 space power is.

The two countries have agreed to work together on Moon exploration— including building a Moon colony and a semi-permanent presence on the Moon. However, judging from such evidence as Russia’s failed Luna 25 mission, Russia needs China more than China needs Russia.

A decade ago, India was working with Russia on the Luna 25 probe, not having had its own experience with Moon exploration. Due to a lack of progress and the belief it could do it faster and better, India stopped working with Russia and worked alone. Its first attempt, Chandrayaan-2, failed three and a half years before Luna 25 reached the Moon. Its second attempt, Chandrayaan-3, succeeded in the same week as Russia’s failed attempt to land Luna 25. The question is whether China will similarly outgrow its need for Russia.

As mentioned above, Russia will leave the International Space Station after 2024. The United States banned China from participation in the International Space Station in 2011. Fuelled by worries that cooperation would lead to technology that benefits China’s military, the United States passed the Wolf Amendment. Russia announced plans to build its own space station during the early days of the Ukraine invasion, amid other political ploys involving space exploration, such as propaganda videos showing that they would leave an American astronaut in space[11] or even hold a UK company’s satellites hostage.[12] However, it is unlikely to be ready in the next couple of years, if ever, due to the limited resources Russia’s space program is suffering from. One option is for Russia to build modules and attach them to Tiangong—or work with China some other way. Tiangong was built in a modular fashion, like the International Space Station, allowing for new modules in the future. It would be another situation where Russia needs China more than China needs Russia.

The race to the top

Will China become the number 1 space power? The United States claims that title thanks to investment and cooperation between NASA, the United States military (e.g. Space Force) and private companies (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SpaceX and so on), which has accelerated the US space program. The progress, spending and pure diversity of projects, whether for exploration or commercial purposes, is truly astounding: missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, satellite networks that will use lasers instead of radio waves to transmit gigabytes of data per second, as well as dozens of small exploration missions planned every few years.

However, this model is not drastically different from what China is doing. The biggest point of difference is the way private companies operate in the two countries. The independence of US companies, which is greater than those in China, has spurred innovation and reinvigoration in the US space program. To challenge the United States for the top spot, China must continue the pace of its progress and find the right balance with the private space sector and innovation.

US companies have a level of independence that allows them to pursue innovation and seek new directions and technology that might not be the priority of the US government. As an example, the drive of private space travel from SpaceX, Blue Origin and others forced US companies to design systems that were cost effective and profitable. NASA frowned on private space travel for a long time. To accomplish it, private companies developed reusable rockets and capsules, making the cost of launching significantly cheaper—twenty-five times cheaper—than NASA’s Space Shuttle. This cheaper access to space benefited not just private companies but also the research sector and the government itself. Until China has truly private companies that can determine their own directions, investments and subsequent priorities, the United States will remain top of the pecking order.

Notes

[1] Sun Ye, ‘In pictures: China’s manned space program marks 30 years with grand exhibition in Beijing’, China Global Television Network, 25 February 2023, online at: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-02-24/China-s-manned-space-program-marks-30-years-with-grand-exhibition-1hGTuxSHQCk/index.html

[2] Rocket Lab Official Website, online at: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/

[3]  ‘New mineral found by Chinese scientists’, China National Space Administration, 9 September 2022, online at: https://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/n6465652/n6465653/c6840851/content.html

[4] ‘Asteroid Explorer Hayabusa2 Initial Analysis: Soluble Organic Matter (SOM) Team reveals organic molecule compositions in samples of asteroid Ryugu’, press release, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 24 February 2023, online at: https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2023/02/20230224-1_e.html

[5] Mike Wall, ‘X-37B: The air force’s mysterious space plane’, Space.com, 31 August 2021, online at: https://www.space.com/25275-x37b-space-plane.html

[6] Fan Anqi, ‘China’s reusable suborbital spacecraft makes successful maiden flight’, Global Times, 18 July 2021, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1228956.shtml

[7] CAS Space website, online at: https://en.cas-space.com/

[8] ‘Все компоненты стыковочного механизма были разработаны и произведены собственными силами Китая’ [All components of the docking mechanism were designed and manufactured by China in-house], Russian.News.Cn, 3 November 2011, online at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120426010439/http:/russian.news.cn/dossiers/2011-11/03/c_131228371.htm

[9] ‘China hopes to expand cooperation with Russia in space’, TASS, 16 October 2016, online at: https://tass.com/science/906725

[10] ‘Government expenditure on space programs in 2020 and 2022, by major country’, Statista, online at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries/

[11] Elizabeth Howell, ‘No, Russia hasn’t claimed it will abandon an American astronaut on the space station’, Space.com, 12 March 2022, online at: https://www.space.com/russia-will-not-abandon-nasa-astronaut-on-iss

[12] Thomas Seal, ‘OneWeb takes $230 million hit after Russia seized its satellites’, Bloomberg, 3 September 2022, online at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/oneweb-takes-230-million-hit-after-russia-seized-its-satellites#xj4y7vzkg

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Such collective, aggressive attitudes towards women’s rejections and criticism resemble the dominant sentiments in the Incel Movement in Western countries. Incel refers to ‘involuntary celibate’; the term started life as the name of an online safe space for women struggling to find romantic partners, but later became a self-referential term among young men who express rage at women for denying them sex.[1] Incels discuss their misogynist beliefs in online forums, where they might become radicalised by the manifestos of ‘incel heroes’ like Eliott Rodger, the son of a Hollywood filmmaker who killed six people and himself in 2014, and injured fourteen others, declaring himself ‘the true victim in all of this’. Andrew Tate, the American–British self-proclaimed misogynist influencer currently facing trial in Romania for rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women, is another exemplar.

Incels have developed their own memetic narrative system, categorising women as either Becky or Stacy, while men who have no difficulty finding sexual partners are Chads.^[2] Chad represents the supposedly desirable masculinity in American society: muscular and sexually attractive due to their genetically masculine features. Stacy is hyperfeminine, attractive and only dates Chads, while Becky is the average-looking feminist. These categories originated on Reddit but have been popularised in recent years.[3]

Online misogyny has been on the rise in China due to a number of factors. A crucial one is the underlying strong patriarchal attitudes and an increasingly gender-conservative media and educational system under Xi. This trend is signalled by Xi’s speech on the Women’s Congress in November 2023, in which he emphasised the importance of ‘love and marriage, fertility and family’ without discussing women as work forces. Another factor is the gender imbalance caused by the one-child policy and preference for male heirs, leading to uncounted female infanticides and nearly 34 million more males than females (the general sex ratio of 105.07 male to every 100 females). Social and economic stagnation over the last decade means that many have no hope of finding a girlfriend or wife, especially given that prevailing ideas around gender and marriage still uphold men as the main breadwinner, and women are perceived to have their desire for a man who has a wealthy background, higher education and property.

Research has shown that men from prefectures with a greater gender imbalance, and under pressure in the competitive marriage market to be able to offer a woman financial security, more likely to commit crimes with financial reward such as robbery, burglary, drug dealing and illegal business dealings. China’s most gender-skewed cohort – in 2021, the 15-to-19-year-old age bracket, with a male: female ratio of 116: 100 – coincides with those most inclined to misogynistic and anti-feminist views similar to those of Western incels.

While there is no equivalent Chinese term for ‘incel’, some comparable terms include the relatively outdated, playful and self-deprecating term diaosi 屌丝 (literally ‘pubic hair’), referring to young men who are disadvantaged in romantic or sexual relationships compared to those who are gaofushuai 高富帅 (‘tall, rich and handsome’), a term with echoes of ‘Chad’. Misogyny, including the blanket sexualisation and objectification of women, can be observed in the diaosi narrative and public discussion – such as scoring women based on their appearance, feminine traits and sexual experience – but the violence that characterises Western incel culture is mostly absent, with some exceptions, discussed below.

After Yang Li’s popular punchline ‘so ordinary yet so confident’, many Chinese women started using pu nan 普男 (‘ordinary men’) or pu xin nan 普信男 (‘ordinary yet confident men’) to describe average, misogynist and overly sensitive men. For example, a female user shared the screen shot of her WeChat conversation with a blind date, captioned ‘Let me show you a pu xin nan’. In the conversation, the man listed the traits he deemed attractive about himself, and after the woman did not reply to him for a few days, he asked her: ‘Are you worried that you don’t deserve me?’ . Similarly, Chinese women have also used words like zhi nan ai 直男癌 (‘straight-men cancer’) and guo nan 国男/蝈蝻 (literally ‘this country’s men’; the second way of writing the characters further belittles Chinese men as insects 虫) to criticise misogynist men.

Unlike in the United States and other Anglophone countries, there are no specific forums or platforms where misogynist men in China gather for the sole purpose of discussing their hatred of women. Instead, they manifest themselves on most of China’s social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, in different ways and for different reasons, often in response to reports of gender-related violence or other incidents. On Zhihu, the most popular user-generated question-and-answer website in China, questions related to gender issues tend to generate polarised debates, with misogynist answers and responses often dominating. For example, many users use ‘easy girl’ or ‘slut’ to answer the popular question ‘How do you feel about or understand the women who date or marry foreigners?’ Other sites where misogynistic discussion and interaction is common include the video-sharing site Bilibili, which hosts a subculture around Japanese anime consisting largely of young men, and Hupu, China’s most popular forum for sports fans, with more than 90 percent male users, who rank female celebrities on their appearances and discuss relationship issues in addition to chatting about sports. All of these platforms accidently evolved into sites with a significant presence of misogynist men because of their large male user bases and the attention economy; that is, a tendency for the most extreme or sensationalist content to attract the most attention.

There are high-profile KOLs (key opinion leaders) among the anti-feminist influencers and incel heroes. One is Zhu Zhou 煮肘 (often referred to as Teacher Zhu 煮老师 and Teacher Precious 宝宝老师). Zhu Zhou had around 495,000 followers on Sina Weibo in 2023. In his posts, he shows off his wealth, criticises feminists and the idea of female independence, promotes the practice of ‘successful men’ spreading ‘good genes’ by producing children with as many ‘high-quality’ women (younger than 23 years old, B-cup breasts, model-level beauty, more than 165 centimetres or pretty virgins more than 162 centimetres tall) as possible and, worst of all, claims that men should attack women who do not fulfil their ‘reproductive duties’ with sulphuric acid. Such violent threats against ‘non-cooperative’ women are not censored by platforms unless there is a mass reporting from platform users.

Different from the Western incel narrative begrudging women’s preference for the physical masculinity of ‘the Chads’, misogynist men on Chinese social media begrudge women for their desire to date or marry wealthy men, yet typically express envy rather than hatred against such men.

The combination of sexual and economic frustration is illustrated in comments made after the suicide of Su Xiangmao 苏享茂, founder of a successful Beijing IT company. Men on social media quickly shamed Su’s ex-wife Zhai Xinxin 翟欣欣 as ‘greedy and vicious’ for demanding a large divorce settlement; they blamed her for Su’s suicide, doxed and harassed her online. Such narratives of ‘gold-diggers’ harming ‘innocent men’ support their argument that Chinese women are greedy and evil.

Misogynist men on Chinese social media also take issue with feminists and the rise of feminism in China (despite acknowledging that at least feminists don’t ask for a bride price). They regard feminists’ speech and campaigns as ‘stirring conflicts between two genders’ 挑起性别对立 and ‘organised by “foreign agents” 境外势力 to subvert China’. Such antagonism against feminism is conveniently combined with nationalism and chimes with the Communist Party’s hyper-vigilance against social instability, its tendency to blame dissent on foreign agents and its own hostility to feminism. Influencers on Sina Weibo such as ‘God’s Eagle’ 上帝之鹰 and ‘Meridian Knight’ 子午侠士 repeatedly use such narratives to justify their trolling, harassment and reporting 举报 of feminists. For example, Meridian Knight wrote a series of posts accusing Chinese feminists, including Lü Pin 吕频 and other #MeToo activists, of being manipulated by ‘Western forces’ to destablise and destroy China. Due to their close alignment with the party-state’s nationalist, anti-Western and anti-liberal narrative, such speech is usually condoned and even promoted by mainstream state-run media outlets. For instance, in 2020 April, Beijing Evening News – an official media outlet operated by the Publicity Department of the Beijing Municipal Committee – issued an editorial that called out feminists as toxic and harmful to Chinese society. The state’s efforts to keep Chinese society stable in its family-based social structure and solve the issue of low birth rates also provides a supportive environment for sexist and misogynist opinions and statements.

As elsewhere, cyber bullying and online aggression also encourage offline violence. In 2020 December, a male university student attacked three female classmates with sulphuric acid in a class. While the exact reason for this attack was never publicised, in the comments section under the relevant news story, many assumed the victims were to blame for being ‘unattainable’ – meaning refusing their attacker’s advances – and celebrated the ‘punishment’ they got. Then there was the incident in June 2022, where four women were violently assaulted by a group of men in a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, Hebei province, after these women rejected one of the men’s sexual advance. Similarly, in September 2023, two women were violently attacked by a drunk man in Yiyang, Hunan province, after they refused to share their contact information with him. In both cases, the violent and graphic security footage where these men repeatedly and brutally dragged down, hit and kicked the women was shared widely on Chinese social media and shocked many Chinese citizens, especially women. Online public discussions demonstrated Chinese women’s anger and fear when facing the rise of misogynistic male violence. Due to the obvious brutality, there were hardly comments supporting the attackers, but the attackers were blamed for their gangster-like violence instead of the gendered violence they imposed on the women. However, there were comments blaming the women for ‘being stupid to fight back and infuriate the attackers’.

An increasing gender imbalance, decreasing social mobility and the dominant misogynist ideologies and discourses left flourished by the party-state means that more young men are likely to express their grievances online in misogynist discourses and that there will be more conflict around gender issues on Chinese social media. This is alarming because the social consequences are real and severe. While there is an official attempt to tamp down online violence in general, the misogynist discourses do not receive any special attention. Xi’s crackdown on civil society and the mainstream narrative of fearing ‘feminism as Western ideology’ means that feminist voices in opposition to misogyny are either silent or silenced. More research is needed to investigate this phenomenon, and governments and civil societies should work together to slow down, stop and reverse this trend.

Notes

[1] Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, betas and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 22, no. 4 (2019): 638–57.

^[2] Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.

^[3] Lisa Cameron, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, ‘China’s sex ratio and crime: Behavioural change or financial necessity?’, Economic Journal, vol. 129, no. 618 (2019), 790–820.

The post Chinese ‘Incels’? Misogynist Men on Chinese Social Media appeared first on The China Story.

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), something started to change around 10 years ago. After a 10-year span marked by surging Chinese investments in the region’s natural resource sectors – financed by the ‘Going Out’ policy, which offered soft loans for Chinese corporations to acquire new projects – the landscape of Chinese economic engagement evolved to include infrastructure development. Even as early as 2005, the China Ex-Im Bank and the China Development Bank had been actively involved in the region, extending loans to sovereign nations for diverse projects. However, the emphasis on infrastructure became particularly pronounced in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. In response to the global economic downturn, the Chinese government pumped money into domestic infrastructure projects, which sustained robust economic growth amid the crisis. These were the infamous three years (2011–13) when China consumed more concrete than the United States had done throughout the entire twentieth century. Soon, China’s construction capacity began to outstrip domestic demand, prompting a global quest for new profitable markets for Chinese contractors. This would mark the beginning of a new chapter in China–LAC relations, in which loans for infrastructure projects executed by Chinese firms became a cornerstone of the trans-Pacific connection, particularly within LAC countries with strained relations with Western-based international financial institutions. Chinese contractors also made inroads into some LAC countries through open bids for public works that have not involved government-to-government agreements or financial backing from Chinese policy banks. Although some analysts like to set the start of this era in a speech by Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan in 2013, where he officially announced the BRI, the underlying currents of change had been set into motion much earlier.

Over the period from 2008 to 2019, China’s development finance rivalled the global lending capacity of the World Bank, with both entities nearing the half-trillion-dollar mark for lending. In Latin America, the volume of Chinese loans in some years surpassed the combined lending of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the US Export-Import Bank, although not all these loans were allocated to infrastructural projects. The distribution of both the number and the volume of loans across the region exhibits disparities. Such countries as Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina emerged as primary recipients of Chinese financial support, whereas others such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have also secured considerable loans in proportion to the scale of their economy. In contrast, Chile, Peru and Colombia remain notably absent from the roster of nations with sizeable debts to China, although Chinese contractors have successfully secured bids for significant public works in these countries, such as the Bogotá metro project in Colombia. By 2023, 21 LAC countries had become signatories of BRI, although formal membership does not correlate with eligibility for funding. Many of these countries were already beneficiaries of loans from Chinese policy banks before joining the BRI. Furthermore, several LAC countries that have not yet formalised their BRI membership are recipients of Chinese infrastructural loans. Indeed, some researchers have contended that the BRI in LAC represents a ‘repackaging of existing relations’ and economic trends set in motion by the Global Financial Crisis.[3] In this context, it is more useful to conceptualise the BRI as a distinct economic moment in China’s developmental trajectory, marked by overaccumulation and the global expansion of Chinese construction firms. Through this lens, a clearer depiction of the developmental impact of the BRI in LAC begins to take shape.

Now often taken for granted, one of the crucial ways in which Chinese development finance reshaped the political landscape of development in LAC was by introducing an (optional) end to unilateral conditionality. For decades, at least since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the region had been subject to structural adjustment programs as a condition for financing. Certain aspects of conditionality might have yielded benefits – others clearly did not, as illustrated by the World Bank’s acknowledgement that the 1980s were a ‘lost decade of development’.[4] A fundamental critique has focused on the undemocratic nature of structural adjustment. Sovereign nations were forced into liberalisation trajectories that in occasions diverged from their electoral mandates. In this context, the absence of political conditionality in Chinese developmental finance, whether BRI-branded or not, was welcomed by those critical of the US-centric global development system. But it is important to note that even though Chinese loans did not come with political conditions such as liberalisation and governance reforms, Chinese loans often came with particularly stringent commercial conditions designed to ensure repayment, and this represented a departure from typical contracts in the development industry.[5] Nevertheless, China’s emergence as a major lender has afforded LAC countries additional options to finance their development agendas, consequently providing them with more political leverage to reimagine development beyond the conventional template provided by Washington-based institutions – even if some might have found themselves ‘doubly trapped’ between two mighty lenders.

By focusing on infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative has addressed a regional gap that the World Bank estimated to necessitate investments equivalent to 6.2 percent of annual GDP.[6] But by lending to this sector the BRI has waded into turbid waters. Across LAC countries, major infrastructure works have been a source of contention and conflict as land use changes and authoritarian approaches to implementation have threatened sustainability and community rights.[7] In this regard, evaluating individual BRI projects requires a consideration of their economic and social returns, alongside an assessment of socioenvironmental costs. Economic dividends are relatively straightforward to measure. In essence, some BRI projects have acted as economic multipliers, generating sufficient economic activity eventually to offset the initial investment. Examples include the expansion of airports in tourism-dependent countries like Antigua and Barbuda, the financing of a national broadband network in Suriname, and investments in road and railway construction and repair in places like Bolivia and Argentina. However, some projects fall short of meeting this multiplier criterion. Examples include ‘white elephants’ like the Montego Bay Convention Centre in Jamaica or, more broadly, underutilised infrastructure such as the North-South highway in Jamaica, which has high toll prices that have deterred many Jamaicans from using it.

There are examples of Chinese-funded projects that might have not been intended as economic multipliers but which have added social value. Examples include construction of hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago. Similarly, the construction of convention centres or cricket stadiums has often been criticised as a wasteful enterprise in the developing world – but some might wish to challenge the notion that sport and cultural facilities should remain a luxury exclusive to the developed world while the poor should focus on productivity. Nevertheless, not all these initiatives have yielded the anticipated outcomes. For example, the Couva Hospital in Trinidad and Tobago fell short of its envisaged role as a children’s hospital, owing both to structural limitations and to neglect of capacity-related challenges.[8] The proposed construction of a new stadium in El Salvador has also garnered attention, raising questions about scale (if built it will be the largest stadium in Central America) while also triggering geopolitical anxieties in Washington – a matter that arguably diverges from developmental considerations.

Related to the above, concerns have also emerged regarding the processes through which BRI projects have been implemented. A salient feature of projects financed by Chinese policy banks is their limited participatory element. The development of the National Academy for the Performing Arts in Trinidad, for instance, faced criticism from local artists who lamented the lack of consultation regarding the needs of the local artist community.[9] In a broader perspective, the construction sector both in the region and beyond has developed a dubious reputation on issues of corruption and accountability. Brazilian and Spanish contractors, for example, have established a low standard in LAC. Chinese enterprises in this sector, too, have faced their share of scandals in such countries as Guyana or Peru. In doing so, they stand on the shoulders of the giants that preceded them, rather than representing isolated anomalies. However, Chinese development finance for infrastructural works stands out for its poor record on issues of transparency, participatory approaches, and consultation. Chinese policy banks typically confine their interactions to central government authorities, thereby distinguishing themselves from such organisations as the World Bank, which, in recent decades, has endeavoured to foster participatory approaches and transparency standards, although not without controversy over whether these initiatives genuinely aim to empower local populations or merely to co-opt them.

Chinese infrastructure projects have also, at times, the distinctive characteristic of relying on an imported Chinese labour force, although the degree to which this has happened varies across the region, with some countries placing severe limitations on the importation of labour. Central American and Caribbean governments have shown a higher propensity for accepting the influx of Chinese labour, a phenomenon less prevalent in South America. For Chinese contractors, the use of Chinese labour is an aspect that might be negotiable, with local authorities being presented with varying price tags depending on the percentage of local workers engaged in the construction process. Employing Chinese workers allows for a more economical and expedient delivery, thereby reducing costs for both parties involved. This efficiency stems from the greater ease with which Chinese contractors can exploit migrant labour.[10] Host countries find themselves at a crossroads, having to decide the extent to which Chinese infrastructure aims to generate local employment versus prioritising the swift and cost-effective delivery of projects.

Furthermore, a considerable number of BRI projects in Latin America and the Caribbean grapple with environmental challenges. Some fall into a grey area; for instance, the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam in Ecuador has locally significant environmental impacts but could contribute to an overall reduction in carbon emissions. In contrast, others, like the Santa Cruz River Hydroelectric Complex, blend labour violations with inadequate environmental impact assessments that downplay the substantial damage they could inflict on local ecosystems.

While many debated the BRI’s merits and characteristics, few doubted it had become a cornerstone in LAC’s developmental landscape. As various Chinese-funded projects proliferated throughout the region, the prevailing belief was that the rise of China was unstoppable, inevitable and exponential, and that China seemed destined to challenge US regional hegemony. However, by 2018, a shift had begun. Reports from the Dialogue and Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center highlighted a substantial reduction in Chinese loans to the region. Having consistently surpassed the US$5 billion mark annually since 2009, the figure plummeted to US$2.1 billion in 2018 and US$1.1 billion in 2019.[11] This was not merely a hiccup but rather a new trend, consolidating in 2020 as the first year in which Chinese development banks issued no loans to the region. Subsequent years saw the total loan figures not reaching the US$1 billion mark per year.[12] This new normal coincided with increasing caution on the part of some of China’s borrowers. The Jamaican government, for instance, announced in 2019 that it would refrain from taking on more Chinese loans for the time being.

A decade since its inception, the BRI finds itself grappling with a midlife crisis. There is insecurity in a model that once inspired certainty, hesitance where success once appeared inevitable. Notably absent from recent Xi Jinping speeches, the BRI has seemingly been supplanted by less China-centric branding, such as the Global Development Initiative. In material terms, China confronts its first overseas debt crisis, renegotiating US$52 billion in loans in the 2020–21 period. This suggests significant miscalculations in China’s overseas development lending, especially in the case of Venezuela. At the same time, while Chinese loans have been rescaled, investments by individual firms not backed by policy banks continue unabated, many of them increasingly under public–private partnership frameworks.[13] This suggests that, at the very least, the BRI has served as a successful mechanism for the internationalisation of many Chinese state-owned and private firms, enabling them to operate with increased autonomy. Furthermore, the BRI has helped to generate a multitude of bilateral and multilateral agreements designed to facilitate new commercial activities in the years to come, including most recently a free-trade agreement with Ecuador, or a yuan-settlement deal with Brazil.

Over the past decade, the BRI has come to represent a significant moment in China’s development trajectory – one that is characterised by state support for the internationalisation of Chinese construction and engineering firms, of which China now has an oversupply. From the perspective of LAC countries, the BRI has reshaped the politics of development and bolstered the developmental agency of policy elites in the region. At the same time, from the vantage point of communities and activists across, the BRI has often reinforced existing developmental hierarchies and introduced new barriers for non-elite populations’ influence in national and local development projects. As the Chinese government recalibrates its commitment to the BRI in light of the successes and failures of the last decade, along with changing global geopolitics and domestic economic challenges, the relationship between China and LAC is entering a new phase, gradually taking shape.

Notes

[1] Michael Clarke, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative: China’s new grand strategy?’, Asia Policy, vol. 24 (2017): 71–9.

[2] Lee Jones and Zeng Jinghan, ‘Understanding China’s “Belt and Road Initative”: Beyond “grand strategy” to a state transformation analysis’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 8 (2019): 1415–39.

[3] Rhys Jenkins, ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America: What has changed?’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 51, no. 1 (2022): 13–39.

[4] Nancy Birdsall, Augusto de la Torre and Felipe Valencia Caicedo, ‘The Washington consensus: Assessing a damaged brand’, World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 5316 (2010).

[5] Anna Gelpern, Sebastian Horn, Scott Morris, Brad Parks and Christoph Trebesch, ‘How China lends: A rare look into 100 debt contracts with foreign governments’, Economic Policy, vol. 2022, eiac054 (2021).

[6] Jeannette Larde and Ricardo J. Sánchez, ‘The economics infrastructure gap and investment in Latin America’, CEPAL Bulletin, FAL 332, no. 4 (2014).

[7] Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente, ‘In the name of the nation: Authoritarian practices, capital accumulation and the radical simplification of development in China’s global vision’, Globalizations, online first (2022). Anthony J. Bebbington, Denise Humphreys Bebbington, Laura Aileen Sauls, John Rogan, Sumali Agrawal, César Gamboa, Aviva Imhof, Kimberly Johnson, Herman Rosa, Antoinette Royo, Tessa Toubourou and Ricardo Verdum, ‘Resource extraction and infrastructure threaten forest cover and community rights’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 115, no. 52 (2018): 13164–73.

[8] Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente, ‘Over hills and valleys too: China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Caribbean’, in Florian Schneider (ed.), Global Perspectives on China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity, Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, p. 171.

[9] Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente and Annita Montoute, ‘A Caribbean perspective on China–Caribbean relations: Global IR, dependency and the postcolonial condition’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 (2021): 219–38.

[10] Wanjing (Kelly) Chen, ‘Sovereign debt in the making: Financial entanglements and labor politics along the Belt and Road in Laos’, Economic Geography, vol. 96, no. 4 (2020): 295–314.

[11] Margaret Myers and Kevin Gallagher, ‘Scaling back: Chinese development finance in LAC, 2019’, Dialogue and BU Global Development Center, China–Latin America Report (2020).

[12] Margaret Myers and Rebecca Ray ‘At a crossroads: Chinese development finance to Latin America and the Caribbean, 2022’, Dialogue and BU Global Development Center, China–Latin America Report (2023).

[13] Kjeld van Wieringen and Tim Zajontz, ‘From loan-financed to privatised infrastructure? Tracing China’s turn towards public–private partnerships in Africa’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, vol. 42, no. 3 (2023): 434–63.

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