Little Red Podcast

China’s Debt Bubble

Louisa Lim

The Biggest Ponzi Scheme The World Has Ever Seen?

 

China's recent impressive economic growth has been built largely on massive debt. According to some estimates, in just over a decade China has managed to rack up debt in excess of 300% of its GDP, effectively placing a ticking time-bomb under the world economy. Is China heading for a financial crisis, and if so when? In this episode, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Dinny MacMahon, the author of China’s Great Wall of Debt, and Tim Murray, co-founder of J Capital Research, who make predictions about China's financial future and explain how Beijing's strategy may be driving a stealthy renationalization of the Chinese economy.

Borderlands

Caught Between Two Countries

Eduardo Baptista

Northeastern China’s ethnic Korean minority – Eduardo Baptista

“South Koreans treat us like foreigners … worse, they treat us like dogs!” shouted Li Zhangyan, a retired 67-year old chaoxianzu, as ethnic Koreans are called in Chinese. He and  his friends had drunk a few too many bottles of soybean wine, making them welcoming to my reporter’s presence, but also easily riled up.

Li has worked in total for over a decade in different cities around South Korea, taking advantage of the higher salaries compared to his home in Yanbian, China’s ethnic Korean prefecture.

“There isn’t one of us,” he pointed at himself and his two friends, also retired, “who hasn’t bought a couple of houses here in Yanbian. We made all this money but South Koreans still look down on us!”

Reviews

Full Steam Ahead

Christina Larson

Christina Larson reviews High Speed Empire by Will Doig

During a smoggy January week this year in New Delhi, I attended the third annual Raisina Dialogue – a coming-out party of sorts for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s growing foreign-policy ambitions, packed with panel discussions that cast a wary eye toward China. There weren’t many speakers from mainland China among the hundreds of attendees mingling in luxurious ballrooms at the Taj Mahal hotel, but the question of Beijing’s rising influence across Asia loomed. On one panel, the leaders of four major navies – the US, Japan, Australia and India – discussed how to respond to this common rival. Another panel asked what perilous strings were attached to new continental infrastructure-funding schemes, a clear reference to Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative.

Translation

Small Town

Li Jingrui

Li Jingrui looks back on her hometown - translated by Helen Wang

This is our final (and longest) piece in a series of four translations of long creative non-fiction essays that first appeared in Chinese in OWMagazine 单读, translated in collaboration with Read Paper Republic. To close the mini-season, former journalist Li Jingrui reflects on her roots, and two decades of change in smalltown China. To support more Chinese voices, give now to our translation drive by donating to our Patreon page, through which we are already close to brining you a wider range of stories like this one.

You can find the same kind of park in every small town. They’re all identical: a park with a small lake covered in water lilies, a few wooden boats that nobody rows tied to the so-called jetty, bright yellow duck-shaped motorised boats puttering around in the middle of the water. The weeping willows trail their branches as they do in poems, though their leaves are grey with dust, except in late March, when the new growth slowly unfurls, and every living thing seems to come back to life.

Excerpts

China’s New Feminists

Leta Hong Fincher

Bearing the torch from centuries-old activism – Leta Hong Fincher

When I visited Hangzhou in November 2015 –roughly half a year after the Feminist Five were released – two feminist activists in their twenties invited me to tour the city’s most scenic landmark, West Lake, in the middle of a rainstorm. We paid an old man to row us across the lake in a small boat covered with an awning to keep us semi-dry. As the rain fell, Gina (a pseudonym) – who worked at the Weizhiming Women’s Rights Center – and Zhu Xixi, a feminist PhD student at Zhejiang University, told me how state security agents had summoned them for questioning several times since the detention of the Feminist Five. Gina’s landlord had just threatened to evict her after coming under pressure from the police, while Zhu Xixi was warned that she might be expelled from her university.