🔔 Will China Roar in 2022?

Video-streaming services are cutting staff. Companies that offer tutoring are reducing teachers and shutting down apps, and real-estate agents have been let go as China’s housing market slows.

Beijing has unleashed a raft of new regulations on the industries as Chinese leader Xi Jinping seeks to rein in what Chinese officials have described as capitalist excesses.

More people are eyeing government jobs—a stable, guaranteed employment system known in China as the iron rice bowl.

This year, more than two million candidates registered for China’s civil-service exam, a 40% surge from last year, making it one of the most intensely competitive in the past decade, according to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

Last month, Evelyn Huang, a 25-year-old graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles, took the exam, despite having secured an offer as an algorithm engineer at a major Chinese internet company.

“Internet companies might start going downhill,” Ms. Huang said. “As many parents say, an iron rice bowl is more secure, especially at a time like this when the macro environment isn’t great.”

“The socialist successor of the new era does not attend after-school tutoring, does not play video games, does not chase celebrities,”

“They finish all their homework at school, read President Xi’s selected works for one hour everyday, go to sleep before 10 p.m., take the initiative to do chores, urge their parents to have more children and help look after them.”

Annual central economic work conference wrapped up on Friday with leaders stressing the importance of boosting demand with ‘front-loaded’ policy support

Beijing hints it will ease up on regulation of big private players after a heavy-handed crackdown this year jolted domestic markets, and excessive capital growth may instead be curbed with a type of ‘traffic-light’ mechanism

“We are facing threefold pressure, including contraction of demand, supply shocks and weaker expectations,”

“the disorderly expansion and barbaric growth of capital must be prevented”

“On one hand, the normal and orderly capital flow has a powerful role in promoting technological innovation and high-quality economic development. On the other hand, the profit-seeking nature of capital can easily lead to its barbaric growth and disorderly expansion,”

“It is more about controlling the negative role of capital from the perspective of avoiding social risks, rather than blindly curbing the development of capital elements,”

“Its essence is not meant to restrict non-public sectors … but to encourage, support and guide the healthy development of the non-public-ownership economy.”