Interesting discussions going around the Chinese Internet re the power WeChat wields as a super app that rolls your work, social, financial life into one.
Apparently when you get suspended, it becomes logistically difficult to pay back the loans you took out on the platform.
Toll payments in China are all made online these days.
One blogger said he missed several toll payments because his old WeChat account got suspended and the toll payment system wouldn’t accept a new WeChat account.
He worried that his financial creditworthiness may take a hit.
Per the discussions, once your account gets suspended, you can still log in, but you can’t send any messages.
In other words, you have to manually add your contacts when you create a new account.
There’s an appeals process, but I haven’t come across any success stories.
Would other platforms be any different?
The answer many people gave is that we should at least separate our financial from our social life, i.e. use WeChat for IM and use Alipay for payments.
The risk of having your account suspended though, can never be reduced to zero.
An interesting side-note to this story is that the screenshot of this blogger’s complaint is blocked on WeChat and other Tencent-owned platforms.
People are saying they tried to share the screenshot in group chats and on their timelines but their friends couldn’t see it.
Lots to think about here...
What are the consequences when natural monopolies and all-encompassing platforms in tech meet tight speech controls?
It's a shame that neither the academic publishers (Oxford, Cambridge, Yale) nor the big commercial ones (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins) regularly commission translations of Chinese academics' work.
Today's most intellectually ambitious Chinese academics (I know of) are Lan Xiaohuan at Fudan and Shi Zhan at Foreign Affairs University.
In the past few years, both published highly original books on Chinese/global history and economics that sold millions of copies.
If you'd like to chart a global narrative that both countries find acceptable, or if you simply want to understand how the CN business and intellectual elite think of themselves, these books are your go-to.
I should add that they're more Tooze/Harari/Mazzucato than Wolf Warrior.
Under this "High Potential Individuals" scheme, visa holders don't need to come with a UK job offer, can work without employer sponsorship, can bring family, can switch to other visas leading to permanent residency.
Previously only UK grads or those w job offers have a path.
Rankings:
College ranking metrics are bad. But here they really matter. "Top unis" are defined as those landing in the top 50 in 2 of the 3 rankings below.
Qs about this PNAS paper on demographic projections for China:
The authors say that the future isn't grim bc once you adjust for 📈labor force participation and 📈productivity, the ratio of dependents to workers is largely unchanged from today's level.
Notation: ADR is the conventional dependency ratio (dependents / workers); LFDR and PWLFDR adjust for labor force participation and productivity (proxied by edu).
It seems like what's driving their difference is the assumption that female labor force participation📈as edu📈.
The authors make this assumption bc in Chinese population surveys, edu is positively correlated with labor force participation. (Makes sense.)
But the problem is that as education levels📈in the past three decades (and esp so for women), female labor force participation📉.
One of China's most prominent technocrats Huang Qifan gave a speech last month on the "five changes in China's development strategy between now and 2035."
The end goal is for China's GDP to exceed $30 trillion by 2035, adding 1.4b to the world's high-income population of 1.1b.
Some highlights (from my vantage point):
ECONOMY
1.1 Self-sufficiency in energy, agriculture, and manufacturing
1.2 Greater openness to foreign investment; greater involvement in international orgs
1.3 Import/export's share of GDP down to 25%; disposable income💹 to 50%
ENERGY
2.1 Cleaner development: CO2/GDP reaching EU/US levels by 2050
2.2 Global leadership in clean energy: #1 in manufacturing, consumption, and "transcontinental supergrids"
Huang makes this analogy:
China:clean energy = UK (Watt):steam engine = US (Ford):combustion engine
2) Individuals across different states have the same level of diversity in music taste, but state-level diversity is quite different -- the measure doesn't correlate with the entropy of states' racial composition but does correlate strongly with the share of Hispanic population.