The poor and uneducated people in China foolishly think that just because their country’s name is People’s Republic of China, their country belongs to them. The affluent and educated people in China, in a very similarly foolish way, are deluded into thinking that just because they worked hard and made money their wealth belongs to them. In either case, the entire population of China has been living under a hallucination, because neither their lives nor their wealth belong to themselves, but to the emperor of China.

This emperor of China used to be the Zhu family in 1400s to 1600s, then it belonged to the Manchu nobility in the 1700s to 1900s and now it belongs to the Communist dictators such as Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping.

And the emperors of China can take whatever, whenever, however, they liked.

郑雯露

Mrs. Zheng Menlu (郑雯露), age 30, worked as an investment banker for CICC (China International Capital Corporation), the equivalent of Goldman Sachs in China. She graduated from Zhejiang University’s Business School, the number one ranked business school in China, the equivalent of Wharton School of Business at UPenn. She lived in the financial district of Shanghai, in a 16 million RMB (2 million USD) luxury condo and her salary at CICC was 1.2 million RMB (200,000 dollars) a year. She was considered the elite of middle class Chinese.

On July 3, 2024, she committed suicide by jumping off the top of a building.

Her suicide sent shock wave throughout the Chinese internet. One Taiwanese commentator said, “I’m a middle aged mother, and I speak for all parents when I say, she is the type of daughter that every parent aspires her daughter to be. She is the dream every parent dreams that their daughter becomes.”

Because not only was Mrs. Zheng Menlu a super-star student, winning numerous scholarships and attending the most elite college in China, also having attended UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) through summer exchange program, but she was also a very beautiful young mother. She was 3 months pregnant when she committed suicide.

So why did she commit suicide?

The reasons for her suicide was threefold according to the articles cited in references below:

1. Due to severe economic downturn in China, numerous companies laid off workers and slashed salaries. CICC slashed her annual salary from 1.2 million to barely 60,000 dollars over the span of three years. And not only that, but because CICC had very bullish report on China’s economy, Mrs. Zheng actually had invested her own money into the stocks recommended by CICC. The Stock Market in China crashed to an unprecedented level just after her investment.

2. Due to population collapse, the Chinese housing market crashed, and her luxury apartment’s worth dropped from 16 million to less than 10 million within a year after she purchased it. She and her husband put down a down payment of 6 million, and so in a year, they have lost the investment of 6 million. Not only that, but the housing market is continuing to plunge, and it is likely, if she were still alive today, that she would see her apartment value drop to less 4 million.

But her mortgage stayed the same! She still had to pay back the banks the exact same amount of money each month! This is why so many people in China are now abandoning their houses and apartments, in the same way that Americans did prior to the 2008 financial meltdown.

3. Retroactive Tax investigation. The Chinese government is in such a severe budget crunch. Even major metropolis such as Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing are facing budget deficit. In order to collect money, the Chinese government activated something called Police Tax Joint Investigation Bureau and declared that their mission is to combat tax fraud, tax evasion, and anyone who is found defrauding the government will be fined and put in jail. And the most ludicrous part of the onslaught is that the government demands that people need to pay back any taxes owed to the government, going back 40 years! If the government determines that you did not pay taxes in 1984, the Chinese government will demand that you pay back the taxes you owed in 1984. So in fact, if Mrs. Zheng were investigated by the Police Tax Joint Force, she will need to pay back the taxes she owed the government 10 years before she was born!

Do you think I’m joking?

A company that was worth of 1.5 billion dollars in market value were reported to have been demanded by the government to pay back 1 billion RMB in taxes, for instance.

The Chinese internet has exploded with shock and horror at the news and you can google and search for yourself to verify. And if you think declaring bankruptcy or completing shutting down the company will stop them, then you are in for a rude awakening. Even after you declare bankruptcy, the Chinese government will still confiscate all your assets to pay back the taxes you owe them, and if you stop operating the company, the government will throw you in jail for “non-cooperating with the government”! I wish I was making those things up, but this is what is happening in China right now.

As you can imagine, everyday there have been reports of people committing suicide in China. Just the other day, 30 people all drank industrial grade insecticide in public and their dead bodies littered the streets of Beijing for hours. Every other day, there have been reports of desperate people plowing into crowds with their motor vehicles on a suicide rampage mission; every other day there have been reports of people who suffered complete mental breakdown and went on a killing spree armed with knives and axes.

So the fact is, when the news Mrs. Zheng Menlu, the elite of Chinese middle class, the dream girl of every Chinese parent–even she!–had commited suicide, the Chinese public felt not just a hard wrenching commiseration, but a sense of despair. “If even she, who is so successful, so much of the jealousy and envy of everyone, if even she committed suicide, then what am I? I will not be able to live through this!”

Even throughout the Covid lockdowns (2019 to 2023), there have been reports of tens of thousands of people committing suicide, driven to madness and despair under the most strict and inhumane quarantine known to mankind that had ever been enacted. There had been reports of people being starved to death inside their apartments under quarantine, people committing suicide inside their quarantine cells by breaking their own necks, swallowing needles and sharp objects, hanging themselves with belts, slicing their own wrists; there were people being burned alive in a fire under quarantine (their doors were bolted and the fire trucks couldn’t get in and the emergency fire exits were also bolted shut), et cetera, et cetera. The horrors of the total and complete covid lockdown eventually caused massive riots to break out in every city all across China, which eventually led the government to reverse course, but the irreparable damage to the economy had already been done.

And now massive suicides are breaking out all across China, and it’s actually even accelerating; Mrs. Meng Wenlu is just the most notable, because of her wealth, her elite education, and her beauty.

The End of an Era: Deep Pessimism set in about the future of China

The Chinese economic miracle is over, in essence, and we are seeing the beginning of the collapse of China. There have been people who have preached that China will collapse for over 30 years, and China has always trudged through, but I believe this time is different. The main reason, in my analysis, lies squarely with the current President Xi Jinping.

China’s economic miracle in the last 30 to 40 years, in summa, was owed to one man and one man alone: Deng Xiaoping, one of the greatest political leader of the 20th century. He was the one who initiated the reform and open up to allow China to become a market economy, and he repudiated the Maoist Central market economy which devastated China. Not only that, but Deng voluntarily stepped down from leadership after serving two terms as the president of China, which was unprecedented in a country that had been ruled by tyrants, dictators, emperors of absolute power.

In pre-modern China, the emperor was not considered human. The emperor was a god, in much the same way Japanese people treat our emperor. But in Japan, the emperor has no political power. In China, on the other hand, the emperor has absolute power.

After Deng Xiaoping, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed the same reform and open up policies of Deng and they both voluntarily stepped down and appointed the next generation leadership after serving two terms.

This tradition came to a halt under Xi Jinping.

Not only is Xi Jinping violating the tradition set by Deng, amending the Constitution, but he is also revoking all the reforms initiated by Deng. To the absolute horror of both Hu and Jiang (Jiang is dead and Hu is allegedly under house arrest), Xi is actually a Maoist who believed in Central Planning, and his brilliance lies in his disguise. Before he assumed the highest office in China, he did not mention a word about Marxism, Maoism, or Communism, but after he was enthroned, he started purging government of all people who disagreed with him: the people who are in the Deng’s camp (the Reform faction, otherwise known as the conservatives within the communist party), as well as in the Jiang’s camp (the Shanghai faction) and Hu’s Volunteer faction. Those were all people who were affiliated or paid royalty to the previous leaders.

He had thoroughly purged the entire Chinese government of dissent and instead put back Maoists, Marxists, and people who were royal to him.

Under Deng Xiaoping, Communism had all been dead but was only alive in name. Xi, on the other hand, revived the dead and recalled the ghost of Mao.

Xi Jinping also restarted personality cult worship just as Mao did, demanding that the Chinese people to display signs and photos of himself in their homes, in churches, studying his “ideology”, erecting monuments and museums dedicated to worship him.

Observers, both inside and outside of China, have commented that Xi is now setting China back by at least 40 years. The observers outside of China are still alive and can still opine. But the observers inside China who said those things have all been imprisoned and “disappeared”. Censorship has reached new height in China to a level not seen since the reign of Mao Zedong. Some Chinese have dubbed Xi Jinping as “Mao Devil Incarnate”, and of course, those brave people have been silenced or “made to disappear”, in the tens of thousands of secret extralegal detention centers that Xi has set up all across China.

At this stage, China has certainly gone back and became a dictatorship. While China under Jiang and Hu were no democracy, the China back then certainly wasn’t as dictatorial as it is now. In fact, both Hu and Jiang practiced a sort of “elite democracy” at the very top in which the highest political members voted (yes, actually voted!) to decide on course of actions to take on certain particularly important matters. American analysts revealed that Xi, on the other hand, is a micro manager and do not trust anyone else to make decisions for him. He also made his subjects to “self-criticize” and he evaluated them based on their royalty, all reminiscent of Mao Zedong.

So from the tragic story of Zheng Wenlu, from this tragic microcosm, we can deduce the state of China as it is today.

Before I end this piece, which had become long winded, and much longer than I had initially intended, I just want to add a few words about Deng Xiaoping.

Deng Xiaoping was actually persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. He was removed from his position within the government, at the direction of Mao Zedong, three times. He had witnessed his colleagues being beaten to death during that era. His son, Deng Pufang, was also tortured during the Cultural Revolution. After one particular struggle session during which Deng Pufang was being tortured to the brink of death, he leaped out of the third story building inside which he was imprisoned, and broke both his legs and his spine. Luckily he survived but he had become permanently paralyzed from waist down.

Deng Pufang, who is still alive today, and works as an advocate for disabled people, spoke out against Xi Jinping when he decided to become an emperor again, and Deng Pufang has been purged from the Chinese Communist Party as of 2024.

So in summa summarum, the economic miracle that China saw in the last 40 years was all due to Deng Xiaoping, and now that Xi Jinping has reverted course, then, the Chinese economic miracle is over and, in fact, it might become much worse very quickly, with both economic and political upheavals coming.

The collapse of China, which many had wrongly predicted before, will be coming for real this time.

References:

https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/24/7/6/n14285051.htm

https://blog.wenxuecity.com/myblog/77949/202407/5942.html

https://news.creaders.net/society/2024/07/07/2749761.html