Is Easter the new CNY?

What a wonderfully empty city we had over the holiday weekend…

Easter saw an “exodus” of residents, with approximately 2.22 million departures made over four days, an increase of 180,000 compared to the same period last year. In contrast, there were only about 400,000 mainland and foreign arrivals, resulting in a “travel deficit.”

Traffic peaked on the final day of the long break as northbound vehicles returned to the city. At 5.30pm yesterday, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge checkpoint reported a 500-meter vehicle backlog, with border-crossing wait times stretching up to 40 minutes.

According to Immigration Department data, as of 9pm yesterday, there were over 957,000 crossings recorded, with inbound travelers exceeding 631,000, some 86 percent of which are Hongkongers.

Economist Simon Lee Siu-po said the ongoing trade war has weakened the yuan, making products appear cheaper for Hongkongers to shop in the mainland.

Some things you might have missed while contributing to that horrible ‘travel deficit’…

China Media Project looks at the gap between Chinese media claims about the country’s tech prowess and the reality…

The current AI landscape, [tech academic Zhu Songchun] said, is one in which media narratives, investment patterns, and government initiatives present a distorted picture of progress. “What’s truly blocking our progress is not foreign technology restrictions,” Zhu told the audience, “but our own limited understanding.”

The reasons for this problem? Zhu says both Chinese media and officials tasked with promoting AI have little understanding of how it works. For their part, the media have fed the public “exaggerated” stories about AI. While Zhu notes this as a key problem, he tactfully steps around an important impetus behind this coverage — the fact that the leadership’s appetite for promoting AI as the next driver of development is also exerting pressure on state media to signal positivity and success. 

…This disconnect was illustrated once again over the weekend, as Beijing hosted a half marathon where Chinese-built robots raced alongside human competitors. The CCP’s official People’s Daily described the event as a “fierce competition” that had pushed the robots to their limits. Xinhua sang about “infinite possibilities,” and proclaimed in its headline that the racing event had “closed the distance between us and the future.” The less stellar reality, alluded to in a report by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily that noted the “many problems” holding the race down, was that the robots had suffered constant failures and necessitated nearly constant repairs by the exhausted human crews running alongside them. In the end, only six of the 21 robot entries completed the race, and one quite literally lost its head.

George Magnus interviewed by Swiss outlet The Market…

If China, with its 1.4 billion people, had an income and consumption structure like the US, the UK or Switzerland, then their economy wouldn’t be in the situation it’s in. But it doesn’t. Why? Because the CCP is wedded to mercantilism, industrial policy, and export promotion. They try to boost growth through exports. But who’s going to take China’s overproduction voluntarily? Many countries all over the world are raising trade barriers against China. They’ve reached the end of the road with their growth model.

…what is the purpose of having a trade surplus? This goes back to Adam Smith, who famously said that the purpose of exporting is to be able to import. To be able to consume other things. That’s the big thing that’s missing in China. They don’t import enough, they don’t consume enough. China’s exports last year grew four times as fast as world trade, and imports didn’t grow as fast as world trade. Something’s wrong there. The philosophy behind China’s economic model is pure mercantilism. 

…so far, there hasn’t been any strong expression [in Beijing] to embark on tax reform, income redistribution, an abolition of the hukou system, or privatization of state assets. Xi is very opposed to welfare payments, he sees them as a Western corrupted practice. There are a few brave Chinese economists at think tanks who have called for such measures. But so far the government hasn’t done it. I’m skeptical that they’re comfortable with the idea of what strengthening household incomes and consumption implies. Because if you really transfer economic power to the citizens, households, and small firms, you are transferring political power as well.

The White House deletes practical info from the US government’s Covid website and replaces it with ‘lab-leak’ stuff. (An investigative journalist’s pithy response.)

What is the conspiracy-theorist/MAGA obsession with the ‘lab leak’ thing? Past experience (SARS, etc) shows that viruses are especially prone to cross species in central/southern China for a combination of natural and man-made reasons. The real scandal, beyond animal-trafficking and mismanaged wet markets, is that local and later national authorities in China tried to cover up the initial outbreak. Next thing, it spread worldwide and cost millions of lives and hundreds of billions in economic damage. The lab-leak story, hinting at evil scientists engineering exotic bio-weapons with Dr Fauci something something, detracts from that.