The pressure is mounting in China.
That is the sad reality for 1.4 billion Chinese citizens who never chose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to rule over them, threaten other countries in their name, control what they produce, or channel their speech to mimic “Xi Jinping Thought” in what for some is the kind of admiration for a hostage-taker that professionals call the “Stockholm syndrome.”
Xi Jinping and the CCP leaders who preceded him are forcing 1.4 billion Chinese citizens down the path to conflict, including against the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. As the world is waking to a war that looms ever closer, business is pulling away from China in fear.
Chinese citizens reliant on censored media appear unaware of the dangers that lurk. They need only to pull back the veil and look at Ukraine or Gaza to understand a bit of the far worse that could befall them. Already, some Chinese citizens are escaping, international business has stopped major investments in China, supply chains are getting cut, and with them, jobs in China are being lost.
What Chinese jobs remain are getting harder. Even in the best of them, as found in the tech industry that includes Pinduoduo, Bytedance, JD.com, Tencent, and Alibaba, for example, workers are getting pressured into longer hours to the point that they sometimes sleep at their desks.
The infamous “996” requirement of tech workers is that they must work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Little is left for friends and family. The 996 schedule is coming back after a brief hiatus. The Chinese tech industry has lost $1.3 trillion in market value since 2021, so it’s trying to make up lost ground by squeezing workers ever harder and extracting ever smaller drops of diminishing productivity.
The pressure of propaganda is also increasing. A rise in the Chinese population’s anti-American sentiment is being pushed by the regime, causing an unwelcome atmosphere for Americans in China. In the worst of recent incidents, a man stabbed four Iowa College teachers with a knife in a park in northeastern China. The U.S. ambassador to China, Nick Burns, implied the park attack could result from anti-American sentiment. Bloomberg cited a broader uptick of violence in China as the result of economic anxiety. Sadly, the regime’s missteps are fueling the very violence and anti-American sentiment that helps push the decoupling it calls a “vicious cycle.”
By Anders Corr
