TikTok refugees, falling bond yields, Tencent, export controls, telecom scam, Pan Gongsheng in HK, birth subsidies - Week in Review #39
What a week!
So much has happened, to the point that I almost regretted not doing a formal review last week to take away some workload for this week...
This week I will review:
The fascinating “TikTok refugees” (free)
Falling government bond yields and what it really means (paywalled)
Blacklisting Tencent (paywalled but can be seen at
)Biden’s “Sanction Week” (paywalled but can be seen at
Telecom scam controversy flares up again along the Myanmar-Thailand border (paywalled, and I am especially proud of my analysis of this one)
Pan Gongsheng spoke in Hong Kong (paywalled)
A small city in China recorded rapid birth growth, proving subsidies work (paywalled)
Warning: this week’s review is very dense. If you are reviewing the webpage version, there is a navigation bar on your left to move to the topic that interests you.
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#1 “TikTok refugees” flocked to Xiaohongshu
[This part originally appeared in but was modified to reflect immediate events of the past days]
For the last few days, China and China-related internet have been obsessed with a phenomenon that absolutely no one predicted to be possible. TikTok users, fearing the platform will be shut down soon, “fled” to, of all places, a Chinese app called 小红书Rednote, which doesn’t even have a full English version.
In many ways, the whole saga of TikTok, which may be the first ever app to be simultaneously inaccessible from both the US and China, is unprecedented (although we just received breaking news that the TikTok ban is not likely to happen now). The current “Great Rednote Exodus” adds another layer of drama: it’s as if the Berlin Wall broke down, but the West Berliners fled to East Berlin this time.
I am sure many of you are already familiar with the explosion of memes during this spectacle. If not, I recommend this article by
of and this funny and superbly written article by of .You can also check out the video below by my teammate,
on Baiguan’s official YouTube channel.The whole episode is funny and extremely ironic.
Politics deprive ordinary people of the right to use certain apps for fear of national security, and so they choose to pour into another platform that strictly belongs to the “other side”, if only just to make a statement. (On Rednote, many “TikTok refugees” make wry jokes about inviting “Chinese spies” to have a look at them. I even saw a girl disclosing her social security number.)
But a larger irony is awaiting: China’s censorship has obviously been very anxious at this unprecedented “reverse-wave” of online users.
There is not (yet) a crackdown on this movement in China, which will look and feel extremely dumb both domestically and internationally. Many Chinese commentators, even traditionally nationalistic ones, are throwing their weight to discourage regulators from senseless meddling. And then, after some noticeable hesitation, official media started to chime in one by one. The first brave shot with some real impact, as far as I know, was fired by an outlet of Beijing Daily, and then followed by People’s Daily and then Xinhua. Overall, they sounded overwhelmingly supportive.
These official media’s stances are important, as they help shape an overall positive and accommodating atmosphere for the public as well as the leadership.
But at this time, it’s not conceivable there will be an actual change to our social media regulatory regime either. For instance, many parts of the Rednote app still have no English translation. If the Rednote team really wanted to get hold of this surprising growth, they should have fixed it in 24 hours, with classic Chinese speed. Yet they had not. On the other hand, there are already many reports of foreign accounts being shut down, some with seemingly no reason.
If I have to bet my money on it, there will be a slow but deliberate “wind-down” of this drama. For instance, a simple “Douyin-TikTok”-style separation of domestic and international versions should do the trick. After all, China’s social media, as of today, is ill-equipped to have a breakthrough of the GFW, even if it’s a reverse breakthrough. (The fact that now it’s likely that the TikTok ban will not happen will also help this Rednote movement ebb away, lessening some social media management pressure along with it.)
But all my realism aside, I can’t help but be touched by the humanity we are witnessing here, even if it can be as fleeting as the Christmas Truce.
One of my favorite comments on this is below (with Claude’s translation):
On Rednote, I saw U.S. military personnel stationed in Korea posting about being exhausted. Under “cat tax” photos, there were discussions about why everyone worldwide keeps tabby cats. Chinese people help Americans with math homework, while Americans help Chinese with English cloze tests. Americans say their education isn't great so their help might be wrong, and Southerners from both countries commiserate about their accents being looked down upon in tests. Arizona rednecks show off their big fish catches, and the comments section is full of Rednote-style responses with others showing even bigger catches.
Disco Elysium fans share photos of their Chinese fan meetups, with foreigners commenting it must be heaven. Black musicians share their performances and explanations. Chinese users ask Americans if they need two jobs to survive, generating over a thousand replies about people's work experiences. Western women contribute new content to Western fandom circles. Native Americans post educational videos, with the most popular comments asking about their food - what they eat, how it tastes, and if it's expensive for tourists. North Indians discuss with Chinese linguists whether their language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, exchanging phonetic comparison tables.
I saw cows from farms just 15 minutes' drive from me, and cattle, horses, and donkeys on desolate farms across different states. Farmers showing off their giant turnips they just pulled. American female miners going underground, female scientists conducting experiments. Chinese birdwatchers looking for rare foreign birds, with hundreds of rare bird photos in the comments.
It feels like we've fast-forwarded directly from the chat room era of ICQ and MSN Spaces to the present, as if everything in between was just a dream.
That last sentence is especially poignant.
Isn’t this dramatic event what our Internet was supposed to be about?
My many memories flashed back. 20 years ago, it was only natural for me to log on to MSN every day and book a time with my pal in Belgium so we could play a WWII game together later that evening. In our long-forgotten memory, the event we are seeing today was not “unprecedented” at all.
I can’t help but wonder, why the people on both sides of the Pacific are so screwed by our political leaders?
What, have we done, to ourselves?
#2 Falling government bond yields and what this really means
Perhaps the biggest economic event that has occupied the discourse around Chinese economy is the rapidly falling government bond yield (as well as the record trade surplus, which sort of goes hand in hand with the falling yield).
Typical reaction from many commentators look like this:
A “complete financial crash” it is.
The trick here, is picking which chart to make your point. The chart chosen by Kyle Bass certainly looks terrible, like a knife jumping into an abyss. Surely if that’s the real metaphor of the Chinese economy, it’s the apocalypse now!
But Economics 101 (or 201, I forgot) told us, a falling bond yield = surging bond price, so if you put the bond price chart here, would you draw the conclusion that Chinese government bond has become the hottest asset class and China’s economy is surging?
The truth is neither.