Bad Mouths, Bad Debt, Bad Bets
China's never-ending deluge of decrees aimed at ameliorating perceived social ills continued Monday. Teenagers can only play online games for an hour a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a notice from the National Press and Publication Administration said. They're allowed an hour on holidays as well.
The rule applies to online service providers, and there will be "inspections," apparently. Violators will be "strictly" punished.
Some expected Chinese tech shares to resume declines this week af
I just sent the lead paragraph to my grandson.
Talk about bubbles! Sounds like Xi has a serious God complex and is living in the bubble of his own thoughts, completely detached from reality.
I can think of a few other historical world leaders who also had similar states of mind, for which there was not a good ending- at least for those individuals.
This won’t end well. Remember the 2 child policy?
If you have nothing better to do, try a simple thought experiment of having Xi and Powell change places. What would Chinese and US financial markets look like in 6 months.
The “bad mouth” decree sounds anticipatory. The government took a “just whack ’em” approach to tech regulation, likely deems it a success, and may now be ready to roll out more, everywhere, and wishes to stifle the recalcitrants in advance. The idea of sector-specific social credit scoring is particularly clever; it foretells a virtually unlimited ability to automate and refine authoritarianism as desired. In industry, one tries to scale up to achieve success. In politics, you scale down.
Yes, sounds like Xi’s political thought is evolving and Chinese society is about to become more productive: “Let a thousand lawns be mowed”. Sounds pretty good, unless you’re a blade of grass.
For me , I look at all of this in context of a Culture War.. Much like a pendulum swings on each swing it tests it’s parameters and the goal is to exploit the opponents weak spot as well as to counter what the opponent perceives yours to be. US lead the similar battle 30 years ago against the Soviet Union but it lead with it’s energy complex and Free Market Capitalism gambit. Against China the Achilles heal is not the same and at this point in time neither is ours so we we lead trying to project American culture which because of the repressive nature of China (lots of reasons for that ) has a market for our version of Democracy and Xi like was Putin is very aware of the playing field . These two Leaders have one advantage and that is a political system that is not in constant disarray . The battle focus is pretty clear through a Geopolitical lens .
Seems like the CCP’s rapidly growing, granular, and arbitrary control of behavior and business models should have a negative effect on private enterprise and capital markets’ dynamism.
If China analysts, strategists, and brokers become actively censored, it will be interesting to see how investors and capital allocators react.
To me those game rules for teens don’t seem to be such a bad idea. Maybe if our teens followed the same rules they might be better prepared for college. A recent survey reported that of their own volition a majority of graduating HS seniors in the US said they were not prepared for college. I taught those students in college for 40 years and they were rarely prepared. Our current K-12 education system has been well and truly broken for decades.
Those eight rules sounded to me that they could easily have been written by the religious “divines” of 17th Century America. A look at the writings of Increase Mather and his son Cotton will show just how high-handed early US religious leaders were. They did burn witches then. Also a peek at the kinds of rules emanating from the ultra-conservative Islamic Right would show many of the same prohibitions and even more violent punishments than proposed by Xi. They still stone people to death in parts of the Mideast. Control of the masses has been the objective of governments and religious leaders for centuries. No surprise that badmouthing is a no-no in 21st Century China.