Yesterday, a man driving a car rammed and killed several children at the Yong’an Primary School in Dingcheng District, Changde City, Hunan Province, China. Also, yesterday, a man bombed a residential home in Binzhou, Shandong, China. These are not unusual incidents. Independent Chinese journalists like Jennifer Zang have been documenting cases like these on a daily basis over the past few months. In China, numerous cases of men and women committing acts of revenge against society are taking place daily across various cities.
Those who have been to China and its large cities know very well that there is little and actual communism in the culture and every-day life of the Chinese people. Chinese urban society is a very hard and competitive society with residents being under constant pressure to earn their way out of living in the city. Personal space and traffic rules are often treated as optional, with bureaucracy functioning as a feudal-criminal enterprise of the Communist Party. Anything can be taken away from you at any time and your turn in the queue may not even come: your life is not as important as the exigencies of the Communist Party. Party members enjoy privileges in all areas of life, with nepotism and corruption being pervasive across all levels of government. As a result, citizens find no relief from the relentless pressures of life, not even through the State.
China has been having a hard economic time since the Covid pandemic and the Chinese state has been hiding the true extent of the ongoing economic crisis, but so far, there isn’t a lot of public skepticism about China’s official figures. Economists acknowledge that China has peaked in oil demand but are so far not admitting there are serious problems in the Chinese economy. China is definitely showing slowing demand via data of its Western imports. Although the official Chinese figures have been rather optimistic, the government has been on plunge-operation spree, first announcing rate cuts and a stock-buying programme for its beaten down stock market, and as of recently bailing out the hidden debt of its local governments by up to $1.4 trillion. Much of this debt ballooned with a spree of public projects that facilitated the spree of private construction building that today resulted in the collapse of major property developer Evergrande, and persisting housing crisis despite up to 65 and 80 million housing units remaining empty.
On the other hand, some economists are arguing that China’s economic problems will be prolonged because the property market will no longer be in a position to spur an economic boom. The economic lag will be compounded with the flight of capital from China, both that of Chinese residents and of foreign corporations. The Communist Party couldn’t have chosen a worse time to pick a fight against its successful corporations in its pursuit for absolute control of everything. Probably, people have already forgotten about Jack Ma, the founder and previous CEO of AliBaba. After having banished its billionaires to obscurity, the Chinese government will find it difficult to blame the current economic woes on its billionaire class, and in reality the Chinese may be more disappointed with the pervasive corruption by their corrupt party officials.
Coinciding with the social revenge attacks, there is also extensive documented footage and evidence of acts of suicide made in public and Chinese citizens humiliating themselves by begging Party and government officials to take action or pleading with their employers for unpaid salaries. Most of it is very dark and dystopian, yet this dystopian crisis is not a new phenomenon in China as poverty, economic crisis, desperation and widespread corruption by government officials have preceded many revolutions and civil wars in China, and Xi Jinping surely knows this. He prefers his people to be focused on China’s external imperial ambitions than the prevailing crisis at home: as would any other Chinese emperor do.
What is particularly remarkable in all of this is the apparent disregard for the value of human life in Chinese society: a fundamental political and cultural trait rooted in the traditional Chinese class system that today is shrouded by the pretenses of communism and collective priority.
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