Posted on 12/04/2023 9:45:24 AM PST by FarCenter
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But still. This is Beijing we’re talking about – where Han Feizi has gotten into his share of street altercations, shoved his way through nonexistent queues, hocked loogies with abandon and raised his voice in government offices.
He has even been party to a bloody brawl with steel rebar and cinder block fragments used as weapons – don’t ask. Han Feizi suddenly felt too old to be doing this again.
One night, as Han Feizi was hardening himself for Beijing’s rough and tumble, he clicked on an Atlantic article by David Brooks. It was a handwringing piece on the decline of social trust in America. While perhaps overwrought, it was written during the lurid 2020 election season when dumpster fires seemed to be burning all over the country. It was a fine essay but one line made Han Feizi chuckle:
Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
Brooks may be a keen observer of America but he obviously doesn’t know China. It’s fine. The article wasn’t about China. Americans, embroiled in a crisis of confidence, were just wistfully extrapolating from footage of China’s bullet trains and glittering skylines. Han Feizi knew better. These social trust scores are fruity, reflecting different cultural interpretations of both the questions and the answers.
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According to Fukuyama, impersonalistic Germans, Japanese and Americans could operate at ultra-high levels of social trust, allowing large corporations to form organically, while familistic peoples like Chinese and Italians need state intervention to form meaningfully large enterprises. Russians, with neither deep familial bonds nor liberal values, degenerate into mafia mayhem in the absence of a strong state.
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And then it all changed. It’s hard to date the change. Covid delayed Hang Feizi’s return to Beijing by two years. But things have definitely changed. China’s intermittent Covid lockdowns lasted three years – the standard length of a generation gap in China. Of course it had to change. The go-go days were spinning of control. A new generation was long overdue.
Hang Feizi is finding this new Beijing disconcerting. What happened to all the smokers? And all the loogie hockers? Everybody automatically queues up in the subway, faces buried in their phones. Three young folks have offered Hang Feizi their subway seats. That was Hang Feizi’s first time getting the senior treatment and it was as humiliating as he had imagined.
Hang Feizi steeled himself for the bureaucratic nightmare of opening bank accounts, getting a local phone number and registering with the public security office, not looking forward to stone-faced functionaries and their dismissive attitudes.
The reality was shocking, as if Han Feizi had entered the Twilight Zone. Bank employees bent over backward to accommodate Han Feizi’s various special circumstances and requests. The public security office was similarly helpful. Han Feizi was on edge for months wondering whether body snatchers had invaded Beijing and turned the population into service-obsessed imposters. He had to test it.
Han Feizi picked an unnecessary quarrel with a DiDi driver expecting the old Beijing blowback. And nothing. Just polite nodding and de-escalation.
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On a recent trip to Hong Kong, Han Feizi had a discombobulating feeling that Hong Kong citizens were rude, dismissive and uncouth. To be sure, in his head, Han Feizi has heavily caveated his observations by the obvious fact that Beijing may not be representative of all of China, that surface niceties disguise deeper pathologies and that some ineffable vitality may have been sacrificed.
This alien high-trust Beijing has also thrown a wrench into Han Feizi’s personal plans. One major reason Han Feizi returned to Beijing is for the next generation. Besides providing a better foundation of China knowledge, Han Feizi believes, with his masochistic parenting philosophy, that young people who have never experienced a developing economy and all its maladies will be too soft for the coming decades.
This is turning out to be a massive fail. Ah well, there are a lot of universities in America.
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See “Serpentza” on YouTube to tell you all you want to know about the present state of China.
Acres of Bikes & EV Cars, GrabHags, Painted Pigs, Tofu-dreg collapses, drains to nowhere. The phony fakery goes on and on. And they are all part of it.
Its all a just a bad show, and it’s all going away.
No, he isn't.
Stumbled on that channel a while back, and his observations always seemed spot on.
Haven’t been to China since the covid, but it can’t have changed that much.
Love his channel.
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