Some late mid-week reading

If you wonder what researchers in the humanities do all day, here’s an academic paper (free to view) in the Journal of East Asian Studies …

Propagandists discredit political ideas that rival their own. In China’s state-run media, one common technique is to place the phrase so-called, in English, or 所谓, in Chinese, before the idea to be discredited. In this research note we apply quantitative text analysis methods to over 45,000 Xinhua articles from 2003 to 2022 containing so-called or 所谓 to better understand the ideas the government wishes to discredit for different audiences. We find that perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty consistently draw usage of the term and that a theme of rising importance is political rivalry with the United States. When it comes to differences between internal and external propaganda, we find broad similarities, but differences in how the US is discredited and more emphasis on cooperation for foreign audiences. These findings inform scholarship on comparative authoritarian propaganda and Chinese propaganda specifically.

I love that last sentence attempting to justify the endeavour. We’re complete nerds and it’s either this or memorizing pi to 1,000 places.

…Overall, sarcastic uses of so-called tend to precede ideas, claims, or criticism that the Chinese state finds objectionable. In some cases so-called is used to convey that the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning in the text, for example, so-called respect for human rights in the US, or so-called genocide in Xinjiang. In other cases, so-called is used to signal that the concept/entity in question is not recognized or is not legitimate in the eyes of the Chinese state, for example, Taiwan’s sovereignty or Hong Kong democratic primaries.

In Carnegie China, Michael Pettis on ‘involution’ – Beijing-speak for ruinous price-cutting by manufacturing companies struggling to survive amidst over-capacity…

…leading to a zero-sum race to the bottom, marked by vicious price wars, large-scale losses, homogenous products, and improper business practices.

…as long as Beijing’s growth strategy prioritizes growth in production, even when that growth comes at the expense of domestic demand, the underlying pressures that lead to involution cannot be resolved. They can be addressed within specific sectors of the economy, but only by shifting excess capacity to other sectors. That is why, in the end, I expect “involution” will join the list of earlier words and phrases—like “rebalancing,” “dual circulation,” “supply-side structural reform,” “deleveraging,” and “excess capacity”—that had emerged in the past to express the same set of problems, and whose sudden surge in usage often faded away. 

Decreeing investment-led growth at all costs following the property market decline, Beijing incentivized massive expansion of hand-picked industries…

Polysilicon production for solar panels became a posterchild for this process. Before the property collapse, polysilicon and solar panel producers were already manufacturing more than the world could reasonably absorb, but after 2021-22, production capacity soared. In less than four years, the top four Chinese manufacturers alone added about two-thirds of the industry’s existing capacity globally, with Chinese producers eventually accounting for roughly 95 percent of global supply—roughly twice global demand.

In Cold War times, Communist central planning was associated with dire shortages of goods (memories of hitch-hiking through Ceausescu’s Romania and seeing stores with nothing but empty shelves). In China, it has led to hugely wasteful over-production. The situation is driven by debt, and it will take even more debt for the state to buy and dissolve surplus companies and factories

From the Diplomat – China’s official narrative of World War II (or, as Hong Kong now puts it, the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War)…

China’s understanding of its war against Japan has changed significantly over the decades. Alongside Japan’s changing historical narratives of the war, this has caused a divergence in historical memory that fuels tensions between the two countries

…The Maoist narrative of the war was dominant in China from the formation of the People’s Republic in 1949 until the early 1980s. It was rooted in communist ideology and blamed the war on a militaristic international bourgeois elite who tricked the Japanese people into a war against China. 

At the same time, the Maoist narrative portrayed China’s wartime Nationalist government as incompetent in resisting Japan’s invasion and highlighted the efforts of the CCP’s resistance, particularly those of the Eighth Route Army led by Mao Zedong. This is despite historical records from the war indicating that, out of 23 battles and over 40,000 skirmishes between China and Japan, the CCP’s forces only participated in one and 200 of these, respectively.

…[Today’s] narrative portrays the Japanese nation as inherently aggressive, placing blame for the war with the Japanese people. It acknowledges the contributions of China’s Nationalist government in fighting against Japan during the war, albeit portraying them as a junior contributor to the war effort to the CCP.

A video of a prominent Chinese archer spitting on and shooting an arrow through a Japanese flag.

Op-ed in a crypto mag by co-chair of the Hong Kong Web 3 Association…

China’s control over cryptocurrency liquidity in Hong Kong gives it unprecedented power over the Trump family’s crypto wealth. This leverage lets Beijing influence the family’s financial fate — and potentially US-China relations — through market moves. As Eric Trump visits Hong Kong, this crypto-political nexus signals a new era of global power.