(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) China's National People's Congress passed the newly revised National Defense Mobilization Law, which will come into effect on October 1. Taiwan's online media "Newtalk" published "China's intensification of national defense mobilization because it cannot afford failure." The author Hong Puzhao is a full-time teacher at the university and deputy executive director of the Mainland China and Regional Development Research Center of Tunghai University. The article pointed out that this revision of the law presents the concept of general mobilization: the new law clearly defines national defense mobilization for the first time, emphasizing rapid transition in peacetime and wartime, and transforming economic and social strength into national defense strength. The military, industry, human and social resources are all included in war preparations. The author reminds that the new law adds an item of "development interests" - if China determines that national development is threatened in the future, it can also be a legal reason to launch national defense mobilization.
Hong Puzhao believes that the CCP has long placed national rejuvenation, territorial integrity and national unity at the core of political legitimacy. Once it deploys large-scale military force and fails, it will impact its long-established narrative of a strong country and its governing authority, and in serious cases even endanger the survival of the regime. If the war falls into long-term attrition, casualties, economic losses and social pressure will be transformed into ruling pressure. Therefore, strengthening national defense mobilization is necessary to prevent battlefield defeats from turning into domestic political crises.
Hong Pu-chao suggested that Taiwan should establish inter-ministerial defense mobilization indicators through the national security system, and incorporate the normal status of China's military production, strategic materials, transportation and logistics, and local mobilization into long-term monitoring to grasp abnormal changes. His reason is that a large-scale aggressive war against Taiwan requires the entire country to prepare in advance, and general mobilization will inevitably leave signs; grasping the signs of China's transition to peacetime in advance can buy Taiwan more time to respond.
Investing in AI "at all costs" will worsen China's domestic demand
The current affairs program "Don't Understand Podcast" broadcast "Xu Chenggang: Where will the AI competition lead the deflationary Chinese economy?" 》. Xu Chenggang, a senior researcher at the Center for China Economics and Institutions at Stanford University, judged on this podcast in 2023 that China had fallen into a liquidity trap. Three years later, he said that not only has the situation not come out, it has been deteriorating rapidly recently.
Xu Chenggang cited data from the National Bureau of Statistics to illustrate the extent of the deterioration: in the first seven months of this year, national fixed asset investment fell by 6.7% year-on-year, "almost as bad as in 1989", while last year it had dropped by 3.8%; corporate accounts receivable - known as triangular debt - increased by 8.1% year-on-year, about half of which was money owed by local governments to companies. Residents also experienced a sharp turnaround. From July to July, domestic car sales dropped by more than 20% year-on-year, residential sales fell by nearly 14% after falling for three or four consecutive years, and home purchase loans dropped by nearly 25%. In May of this year, total retail sales even experienced negative growth, which he said has never happened since the crisis in 1989, except for the epidemic.
While overall investment declined, investment in high-tech industries increased by 5%, of which investment in the information services industry increased by 19.2%. Xu Chenggang believes that this seems to be a contradiction, but it is not contradictory: local governments have no money, so they invest the little money they have left in semiconductors and AI, because this is the strategic deployment of the central government. He repeatedly used the concept of "opportunity cost" - when market economy countries face serious shortages of domestic demand, they will use fiscal policies to stimulate consumption and invest in employment-intensive fields to form a positive cycle, while the Chinese government invests fiscal expenditures in directions that require less labor. He pointed out that when the general unemployment rate has exceeded 10% and the youth rate is close to or even exceeding 20%, "the more you develop, the greater the unemployment problem will be."
A book about "us"
The American online current affairs magazine "ChinaFile" published a book review "Reading My Own Life". The author Shen Lu is a journalist with more than ten years of experience in reporting on China. She was reviewing the English novel collection "Memory Museum" by New York-based Chinese writer M Lin. The nine short stories were about Chinese urban women who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Shen Lu said that she had never read such a book about "us" in either Chinese or English before, and it would be impossible for it to pass censorship in China. She believes that most of the existing Chinese-themed literature in the English-speaking world is set in eras that are more familiar to the West, such as the Cultural Revolution; and this book is about the past few years - political and social changes, sandwiched by an epidemic that cut life in half. One of the articles writes about the Shanghai lockdown that brought down the marriage of a couple who had returned from studying in the United States. The two argued endlessly over Internet censorship, Hong Kong protests, the siege of a female talk show performer, and the algorithmic exploitation of workers by major factories.
Talking about how the outside world imagines life in authoritarian countries, M Lin said, they think we are miserable, but we are also living our own lives; both can be true, just like women around the world, we are also considering whether to be mothers.
