In light of the PRC's claim that the revenue of firms with annual revenue over ￥20M saw a revenue increase of 6.8% YoY in May, take a look at this post that is consistent with anecdotes I hear all the time.  This site is the Chinese version of Quora.  Question: "Why do I always feel the end of the world recently? Do you have this feeling?" Someone who claims to be a young bank loan officer gave the most popular answer that has received over 10k net upvotes in a few days.  I will translate a few points for your convenience.· As a loan officer, he deals with his bank, govs, and all kinds of businesses and consumers, so he should have a panoramic view of the economy. The following are just summaries of a few of his informative observations.  He has been having high anxiety recently. As a loan officer, his primary job is writing reports for regulation agencies instead of lending money. He would be summoned by executives constantly if he wrote the truth, so it is a very tough

With so much resentment and internal cracks, the middle school dropout may have the same reason as Mao did to start the mob phase of its cultural revolution 2.0, but I am not sure he had sufficient worship from the masses to carry it out. In an extremely rare case, Mao admitted his mistake in the famine at a conference with 7k attendees in 1962 and ceded part of his power to Liu and Deng.  Mao always found a way to take back his power. He usually maneuvered at the top, but it was hard for him to do it this time after the famine with Liu and Deng gaining widespread respect, so he mobilized the masses to help him get rid of bureaucrats on the "wrong" side. His success was spectacular for him - he regained a firm grip on the power.  The middle school dropout has not lost any power but the discontent with him is probably as widespread as it was with Mao in the early 60s if not more. The bureaucrats of Shanghai apparently defied his zero-tolerance order early this year. Anyone who

Probably most would agree this year is the most unpredictable one for the PRC since 1989. Anything dramatic that people have hoped, wished, or been afraid of can happen with a non-minuscule probability - war, CCP internal coup, precipitous economic downturn... I am talking about possible events with non-negligible probabilities, not probable events.  If the middle school dropout (Xi) manages to survive and hold onto his power, the likely scenario, it is almost impossible for the PRC to continue to grow its power. This is the best POSSIBLE scenario that I can imagine for him: The yes-men around him manage to find an off-ramp for his zero-tolerance idiocy that is wreaking havoc now. One possible approach is to order the WHO's Tedros to declare the end of the 1st corona pandemic phase, so he can declare his victory in this phase, and phase out the zero-tolerance. Corona will cause short-term pains as in the DPRK, but they can manipulate the data easily. On the economic front, West pol