Yes, the Chinese state wants to balance the budget. That is not even a central tenet of neoliberalism, though. What is are privatization, the destruction of state capacity, and the elimination of regulation.
This is incorrect. In fact, privatization did happen in China. All of the big tech and renewable energy companies you hear about including EV, solar, AI and robotics are all private companies.
However, you are still missing the fact that China had been able to avoid austerity for the most part because of the tremendous exchange of cheap Chinese goods being sent to the Western countries. Many other countries (especially post-Soviet Eastern European countries) also tried to balance their budget but simply did not have the vast labor pool to dominate the export market to matter.
This is the real outflow of China’s wealth - an immense outflow of real resources and labor for decades that could have been spent to improve the lives of the Chinese people. This is the reason why people in the West can enjoy cheap goods.
Always think in real terms and it’ll make sense. Who’s gaining the actual goods and services, and who’s working hard to make them in exchange for a financial asset.
lol, the only reasons I am posting here are to 1) practice my English and 2) provide some educational value stuff to people who are interested in learning about China. You can choose to ignore my posts if you don’t like to learn about this kind of things, which is completely fair.
Indifference. This is why stuff like this mostly only gets posted by the libs (of which I am being accused of quoting from lol). You’d barely see reporting of these issues on mainstream or left-leaning media.
Through pirating lol. It’s extremely easy to access pirated films complete with fan-made subtitles on the internet. People go to cinema to enjoy the atmosphere in the theater.
Thanks for the update. This explains a lot and tracks with what I have read from the Chinese internet.
Unfortunately there are some that tried to blame it on the producers, but your explanation pretty much clarified and tracked with what I have said in this thread.
Anyway, the film has been withdrawn from a wide theatrical release due to receiving too much complaints, so I guess they won’t have to deal with it anymore.
Given the market situation, isn't it a good time to get some consolidation in these industries?
No, the so-called “overcapacity problem” is really just a symptom of a much larger problem that nobody is willing to admit: wealth inequality.
You have an oversupply because… nobody has the money to consume, or, people are being extremely reluctant to consume because of the perceived poor economic outlook, and that they are going to lose their jobs at any given moment due to the uncertainty in the economy.
What the government should immediately be doing are:
This is a wealth distribution problem, and that wealth is being funneled into the financial sector because local governments had taken out huge loans to finance the infrastructure and housing market over the past decade, and find themselves unable to pay back after Covid decimated the local finances, and as the property market bubble bursts since 2021.
And the local governments had to self-finance because back in 1994, the central government decided that their tax revenues were inadequate to finance the SOEs all across the country (it received only ~20% of the total tax revenues while local/municipal governments, especially the rich coastal provinces with export market, kept the rest). This is because China’s economic model follows the neoclassical theory - that the government is run like a household: it has to earn the tax revenue before it is allowed to spend.
As such, we have the Tax Sharing Reform that further decentralized the economy, with the local governments having to pay much more tax to the central government (~75% goes to the central government) while being burdened with financing the SOEs themselves.
This led the Northeast Three provinces (where China’s heavy industrial SOEs were concentrated) to mass privatize. It is estimated that at least 40 million workers became unemployed during the mass privatization wave from 1996-2002, a trend that would not be reversed until China joined the WTO and turned itself into a “world factory” in the early 2000s.
But the most important legacy of the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform was that local/municipal governments realized that they could no longer rely on the central government funding, so they had to seek their own sources of non-tax revenues (that would not be taken by the central government), and that include private investments and land revenues. The ticking time bomb was already laid back in the 1990s due to how the decentralization of the economy was arranged.
So, it comes back to wealth inequality. The wealth are being used to service the massive amount of debt that the local governments had taken out and save the investors, and did not go to the working class. And this is allowed to happen because the central government believes in the IMF “balance the budget” formula, and is extremely hesitant to run a deficit to give people the money to spend.
No problem. I still get emotional about it lol. Maybe I am being a bit unfair against the Shanghai people haha.
You can tell from my comments that I almost never criticized anything from 1976 to 1994, with the exception that Deng screwed up the price reform in 1988 (a legitimate L), which, together with the June 4th (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, forced him into semi-retirement, though his influence remained vast even in retirement. Otherwise I have always acknowledged his contributions as significant.
The watershed moment was the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, which forced local/municipal governments to seek for alternative (non-tax) sources of income to finance their own operations. This led the Northeast heavy industrial provinces to mass privatize their SOEs, and the ensuing unemployment wave that caused an economic crisis in 1995-6. Two major policy changes happened afterwards: Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing distribution policy (government giving free housing to employees) in 1998 to unleash land capital to save the economy, and China joining the WTO in 2001 to reverse the unemployment trend.
The censorship itself is a process.
If the semantic argument here is that the censorship bureau doesn’t do all the cutting by itself, then technically the government doesn’t censor anything at all. The government simply tells you what is and not acceptable. The party that submits the product for licensing and approval has to do all the alterations.
As I mentioned, there are only two film companies that are allowed to handle imported films, and have done so for at least two decades importing hundreds of foreign films over the years. So these people know what they’re doing. The ridiculous part here is how they thought it would be a good idea to buy the film distribution rights and use AI tool to alter the contents to get around the issue. People aren’t buying it this time lol.
I used machine translation for you. Haven’t watched all of the shows mentioned, but a cursory glance seems accurate.
spoiler
The good news is that not a single terrifying scene from “Together” was cut, but AI face swapping is a uniquely Chinese horror that Western audiences can't fully grasp.
Let's examine other examples. During its mainland China release, Bohemian Rhapsody had all scenes hinting at Queen frontman Freddie Mercury's homosexuality edited out or muted.
In Game of Thrones Season 5, a scene depicting a male prostitute being stabbed to death for homosexuality was removed. Season 8 saw Yara's one-second kiss with Daenerys in Dorne deleted.
In The Two Cities 2, all lesbian subplots involving the female lead (a policewoman) were removed.
After the comic adaptation of Little Green and Little Blue became an animated series, all same-sex content was removed. (Thanks to @Wu Ming for the comment supplement)
In Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, all emotional lines between Dumbledore and Grindelwald—such as “I fell in love with you”—were deleted, retaining only vague expressions like “We are brothers.”
After Friends launched on streaming platforms in 2022, all dialogue implying Carol's lesbianism was edited out.
In The Shape of Water, content depicting Giles facing workplace discrimination due to his sexuality was cut.
In Four-Wheel Brothers, Hijikata Rei—a boy who paints his nails and wears lipstick—was altered to a girl in mainland China.
In Alien: Covenant, a kiss between two male androids was cut.
In Soul, the romantic tension between the boss and scientist was altered to “brotherly love” (thanks to @博哥逍遥游 for the comment).
Call Me by Your Name was scheduled for the 2018 Beijing Film Festival but was pulled due to “technical reasons.”
Cloud Atlas was cut by 37 minutes, including same-sex kissing scenes.
Carol (limited release) had all same-sex intimate scenes removed.
In Love, Simon (Shanghai Film Festival screening), the protagonist's coming-out conversation with his mother and the bar scene were both cut.
TV series like “Queer as Folk,” independently uploaded by netizens to platforms like Bilibili and Youku, were entirely removed despite never being officially released in mainland China.
After “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won an Oscar, all mainland plot summaries replaced references to the protagonist's gay daughter with “daughter with Westernized lifestyle.”
During the 2019 Oscars rebroadcast, Chinese platforms replaced the subtitle “a gay man” in Malek's acceptance speech with “special group.”
The Eurovision Song Contest had its broadcast rights revoked by the EBU from Mango TV (2018) for censoring “rainbow flags/same-sex content.”
Previously, it was just censorship and muting. Now, AI face swapping has emerged—it must be said, technology has advanced.
You are correct but misunderstood my point. I remember clearly that Shenzhen and Shanghai went into lockdown around April 2022 at almost the same time, with quite a staggering outcome.
The March-April 2022 wave showed how costly it would be to get the pandemic under control again if “accidentally” allowed to be spread again. This is the lever the Shanghai libs have over the central government. When Li Qiang (who was criticized for his handling of Covid) was made Premier in October that year during the 20th CPC Congress, it was clear that the libs have regained control. By December as a new wave appeared, the Zero Covid policy would be abandoned.
Usually, they only censor the explicit content. But this is the first time that AI tools were used to directly alter the content of the original film.
By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.
Who wants to bet that some Trump cronies just earned a fortune buying the stocks at the bottom?
He always does that lol. Say something, stock goes down, walks back, stock goes up again. It’s almost a recurring pattern at this point.