All Work and No Play Unmakes China

It is hard to imagine how one of China's innovative business leaders or beautiful movie stars could look at the Chinese loyalists hunched over their desks at a Chinese Communist Party Congress and commit all their energy to further the will of Chairman Xi. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who decided to end the 1989 democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Sq uare by force, proclaimed, "It is a glorious thing to be rich." Yet, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, who is said to be among the leaders receiving the highest remunerations in the world, does not pocket any interest on her funds. Prompted by fear of US sanctions, she has no bank account and keeps her cash at home. Mr. Deng neglected to include joy, happiness, fun, freedom, beauty, truth and privacy on his list of glorious pursuits. In AMERICAN FACTORY, the Netflix documentary film about a Chinese factory in Ohio, a Chinese factory manager reveals he has had to commit to two years working away from his family. Even so, the factory manager is one of the lucky men his age who has a wife. China's earlier one-child policy has left 30 million men without mariageable women in 2020. And China's well educated urban women expect to marry men with money; they are not about to settle for villagers. While the Chinese Communist Party focuses on collecting data to control its 1.4 billion Chinese population, the Chinese people entertain other ideas. Ignoring social distancing and assorted restrictions imposed to prevent the coronavirus, China's young people flocked to see Mickey Mouse as soon as Disneyland reopened in Shanghai in May, 2020. For relief from China's "996" work schedule requiring labor from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week, fun-loving Chinese also ignore the government's distain for the lack of socialist values associated with playing Tencent's "Honour of Kings" or watching amateur dancers, singers and comics on Douyin, China's version of TikTok. Some have discovered they can discuss taboo topics away from censors on the Clubhouse app. Unfortunately, a team of Buddhist monks and nomad sheep and yak herders failed to play in a 2019 international basketball tournament because their participation was canceled by Chinese police who felt they might be unable to control a crowd of fans during the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Watching the Chinese Horse Club owners cheering when their Triple Crown winner, "Justify" won the 2018 Kentucky Derby, no one would have known China bans gambling. China's race horse buyers and trainers also can be seen at the New Zealand Jockey Club. Casinos on Macau, the former Portuguese island that is now a Special Administrative Region of China, continue to attract wealthy Chinese. Less affluent Chinese hide in the woods to gamble on mahjong games. At the same time, the Chinese culture that cultivates cheating and lying to achieve business objectives caught up with Lin Qi, the billionaire developer of "Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming," who died of poisoning on Christmas Day, 2020. Founded in 2009, Mr. Lin's Chinese YooZoo Games studio launched his popular strategy game in 2019. Accordig to the BBC, Mr. Lin was poisoned at the hands of a suspect, identified by Shanghai police only as Xu, but later as Xu Yao, the head of YooZoo's film productio unit. YooZoo holds the film adaptation rights to the popular Chinese sci-fi novel, THREE BODY PROBLEMS, the first of a trilogy by Liu Cizin. Like other Chinese movie projects, the plan for the book's film adaptation never developed. But Netflix now seems ready to adapt THREE BODY PROBLEMS for television. China expected its 1.4 million-plus population and twice as many eyes to serve as waving strobe lights attracting film-makers to Qingdao's new 2016, $8 billion film production complex. At first they came, but they soon refused to deal with the demands of censors in China's State Administration of Press Publications, Radio, Film and Television. China's popular film star, Fan Bingbing, was on her way to international fame until the government charged her with tax fraud, and she disappeared. Nowadays, the fledgling movie industry that made a Netflix romantic comedy despite electricity outages in poor little Zimbabwe offers more promise than China. Just as China allows its population limited film fare, readers have to be content with propaganda slogans on factory walls. In 2015, the owner of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Books was arrested and charged with the "illegal sale of books," the political thrillers and bodice-rippers the Central Propaganda Department decided the Chinese population should not read. Before moving his bookstore to Taiwan in 2020, he observed, "Contemporary China is an absurd country." No doubt, most cowed Chinese will self-monitor their activities to conform to Beijing's control requirements. But some will defy personal recognition by shielding their faces with umbrellas and masks, wear black-face makeup to trick artificial intelligence into thinking they are apes, point lasers to disable surveillance cameras and travel on crutches or in wheelchairs to "disguise" their gait. What will the top tier geniuses China needs do? As some have done in the past, they will tire of finding their natural human desires unsatisfied and flee to Silicon Valley.

China-Mongolia and the Deaths of Race Horses in California

Many aspects of global life illustrate how connected the world is. As preposterous as a connection between China, Mongolia, and last year's deaths of 23 horses at California's Santa Anita racetrack  seems, it is a connection worthy of  investigation.

     On the books, China's Communist regime outlawed gambling when it took over in 1949. Efforts continue to purge online betting apps, and prison awaits those who challenge Chairman Xi's abhorrence of corruption. Nonetheless, local administrators of state-run lotteries manage to take their cuts, gamblers access online casino apps designed in Southeast Asia, illegal mah jong games hide from overhead drones in China's woods and mountains, and police even had to break up gambling at a cricket fighting tournament near Shanghai in August, 2019.

     Off shore, casinos dominate Macao, a former Portuguese island and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region. In 2017, New Zealand created a Jockey Club to attract Chinese  thoroughbred buyers and to cater to Chinese owners who want to train and race their horses in Australia and New Zealand. When Justify won the Kentucky Derby and the other two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown in 2018, owners from the China Horse Club just laughed after a reporter questioned how racing squared with China's ban on gambling.

     If there is a connection between China and the 23 race horses that died at Santa Anita, it runs through China's landlocked northern neighbor, Mongolia. The historic domain of Genghis Khan's horses and riders also is the current home of dusty courses where hundreds of children as young as five ride bareback in races to win a Russian-made car. When racing was legal in China, owners used to send their horses north to strengthen their bones by grazing in the nutrient-rich  pastures of Mongolia. Reporting on the fatal leg injury that caused the horse, Mongolian Groom, to be euthanized after the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November, 2019, Billy Reed mentioned the need to reassess the calcium-building limestone content of the soil and water where many race horses graze in Kentucky.

     As a cause of last year's race horse deaths, in recent months the coronavirus is receiving more attention that the dietary value of Kentucky's pastures, Scientists suspected COVID-19 could pass between animals and humans after researchers discovered pig farmers died of coronavirus in Malaysia. Observers watched bats land on a tree and poop into a vat of pig slop. Tests found the bats carried COVID-19 and transmitted the disease to farmers who had contact with the pig slop.

     The coronavirus that affects humans and the equine enteric (gastrointestinal) coronavirus horses pass between each other are both among the large group of RNA messenger viruses. Since both forms of the virus in horses and humans lock onto cells using the same kind of spikes, transmission between  these species is highly probable. Lack of evidence showing horses and humans exchange COVID-19 at this time may be a function of a lack of testing fecal samples of thoroughbred race horses and the failure to test personnel at Mongolian Stable, who may have shown little or no initial symptoms of the virus.

     In August, 2019, the San Diego Tribune ran a photo showing Enebish Ganbat, a Mongolian who trains horses at Mongolian Stable, kissing Mongolian Groom's face. Such gestures, not unusual among those who love and care for horses, provide ample opportunity for humans and horses to transmit coronavirus to each other. Horses contract equine enteric coronavirus by contact with surfaces exposed to the manure of infected horses or by consuming some of their manure. Therefore,  to prevent contracting coronavirus from a horse, people need to wash their hands whenever they touch anything, such as a shovel or pitchfork, that may have been in contact with an infected horse's manure. Unless humans who have or may not yet show symptoms of COVID-19 wear masks, they may spread coronavirus to horses.

     Before racing resumes at Santa Anita this summer, last year's fate of Mongolian Groom is reason to test the nutrient value of Kentucky's pastures and to test for the presence of coronavirus in the horses that race there.

             

"I Don't Like to Talk to People"

Sometimes a statistic jumps out at you. The December 2018/January 2019 issue of the AARP Magazine , originally targeted to "old" people over 55, reported one of its studies found, "a third of Americans over age 45 are lonely." There are seven billion people in the world, I thought, how is this possible?

     Then, I remembered hearing a young person, who was ordering pizza online, say, "I don't like to talk to people." In many parts of the world, modern life makes it possible to avoid talking to people. Besides ordering food, you can make appointments, do your banking, get a boarding pass, and order just about anything, from clothes to concert tickets to a date, online. Ear buds enable a person to cut off all contact with the outside world.

     When using social media to "talk" to people, I've noticed communication often is brief. If you venture a longer comment to express an opinion, you can be misunderstood or shutdown with an insulting reaction. Back and forth discussions frequently fail to exist.

     It also has become fashionable to reject God and to glorify the kind of individualism that makes people intolerant. They stop engaging in discussions with others and accept their own ideas as Gospel. Once someone casts aside the God-given Ten Commandments or teachings of Jesus, there is no universal secular moral code for a person to follow. It's easy to claim, "unbelievers can be highly moral people," but, through the centuries, people have substituted very questionable moral codes: white Europeans are better than blacks, browns, yellows, reds, and even Jews and dirty whites; capitalists decided they were free to make their own money-making rules because it's "survival of the fittest"; Ayn Rand said tap dancing was the only acceptable form of dancing, because it relied on rational thought not emotion.

     It seems there are many paths to loneliness. And there are many destructive remedies: suicide; joining a gang; addictions to food, alcohol, gambling, video gaming, exercise, couch potato binging, sex, and work; deciding not to talk to family members or to keep up with friends who are too stupid or who reject your ideas or lifestyle or you reject theirs.

     Over the past holiday season, I've heard people say, "Thanksgiving is just another day, and I'll be able to catch up on work." But I've also seen photos of smiling friends and couples traveling to different parts in the world. I've received a CD of a friend singing in a choir, and I've seen Facebook items from a mom proud of her son's performance as a hockey goalie. My granddaughter and I baked gingerbread cookies and argued about whether to use raisins or tiny chocolate chips for reindeer eyes. She asked me to name seven of her friends. I couldn't, but now I can.



   

   

   

China Beyond the Headlines

Much is made of the contrast between the corruption overlooked in Russia and the crackdown on corruption in China. But other Chinese behaviors and practices deserve examination.

     Stealing is rampant in China; the country's prohibition on tax evasion and gambling is evaded; and a form of discrimination is legal. Foreign companies expect their intellectual property rights to be ignored. Chinese companies contracted to manufacture products for foreign firms readily produce knock-offs of those same products. Even exchange students find they have to keep a sharp eye on their belongings or they will disappear. An engineering student from a U.S. Ivy League college, who planned to stay in China for a couple of months, left after a week when her caliper was stolen.

     China is not exempt from tax dodgers. There is the revenue a company makes, the amount it reports for tax purposes, and the difference deposited in overseas banks or in Khorgos, an out-of-the-way Central Asian Chinese town on the Kazakhstan border. Along with film studios, media outlets, financial services, and over 14,000 other companies, Chinese movie star, Fan Bingbing, who earned $43 million in 2017, registered her company in Khorgos. Ever since China began a probe into tax evasion on June 3, 2018, Miss Bingbing has not been seen in public, and she has been fined $129 million. Her 62 million followers on social media correctly speculated she was caught in the Communist Party's anti-corruption, tax evasion campaign. She also might be a victim of President Xi Jinping's new morality crackdown on culture and behavior not in line with socialist values.

     Gambling is illegal on the Chinese mainland. Beijing stopped approving new gaming apps created by China's Tencent tech leader and  pressured Apple to remove gambling apps in its Chinese App Store. But casinos attract Chinese gamblers to Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China, and Chinese travelers freely gamble on overseas trips. "Justify," the winner of the Kentucky Derby,  Preakness, and Belmont Stakes is owned by the China Horse Club, as is "Audible," the horse that came in third in the Kentucky Derby. No doubt Chinese handicappers won plenty of cash, when "Justify" won all three legs of the Triple Crown.

     Finally, the U.S. State Department's annual report on religious freedom called attention to the million Uighur Muslims China holds in secret re-education camps. In another example of discrimination in China, members of China's poor underclass, unskilled rural transplants earning little in city jobs, find they are victims of the hukou system. They are shut out of health care, housing, and quality educations in state-run schools. They also have been shut out of watching some short-form videos on Douyin, the app Chinese authorities find shallow and addictive and monitor for illegal or morally questionable content contrary to socialist values. Young Chinese viewers say they enjoy watching good-looking amateurs tell jokes, sing, and perform imaginative stunts on Douyin; it's fun and relaxing.

(Also see the earlier posts,"China's Plan for World Domination" and "China Stretches a Napoleon-Style Belt.")