Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.
.. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world.
.. In the 1980s the faith grew most quickly in the countryside, stimulated by the collapse of local health care and a belief that Christianity could heal instead.
.. Gerda Wielander of the University of Westminster, in her book “Christian Values in Communist China”, says that many Chinese are attracted to Christianity because, now that belief in Marxism is declining, it offers a complete moral system with a transcendental source. People find such certainties appealing, she adds, in an age of convulsive change.
The Simpsons Go to China
Later this fall, “The Simpsons” will begin streaming in China, as part of a new multi-year deal between Fox and Sohu ..
.. America’s culture industry has never been so beholden to the rest of the world. Hollywood blockbusters like last summer’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” for example, have become meticulously engineered attempts to simultaneously court audiences from Peoria to Shenzhen.
.. Satire responds to the realization that we’ve been sold a bill of goods—that the choices we’re offered are illusory and all ultimately the same. It is a weapon of the weak, a way of critiquing the world by stepping outside of it, if only for the span of a joke. There’s a growing space for this kind of protest, as China’s fiercest Internet activists have become masters of censor-dodging puns and the authors of complex, ironic allegories for authoritarianism and surveillance.
Government Debt Isn’t the Problem—Private Debt Is
What’s alarming is that, of the two ingredients for an economic crisis—high private debt and rapid private-debt growth—one is still with us even after the 2008 collapse. Private debt in the U.S., relative to GDP, stands at 156 percent. That’s lower than the 173 percent it reached in 2008, but it’s still nearly triple the level—55 percent—it was at in 1950. Indeed, across the globe there has been a steep climb in the ratio of private debt to GDP over that period.
.. Applying our private-debt early-warning criteria to China, we can see that its economy is at risk of a major financial crisis in the near future—a significant concern because of its size and importance to the world economy
.. What’s more, excessive private debt may contribute to one of the great problems of our time: growing income inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class. The middle class tends to grow when there is too little capacity and low private debt (as after World War II). In contrast, the middle class plateaus or shrinks when there is too much capacity and too much debt (as at the present). Stated differently, inequality increases when there is high capacity and high debt; it decreases when capacity and debt are low.
War as a Distraction
Recently Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review suggested that the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy. As he noted, Mr. Putin’s hold on power partly reflects a long run of rapid economic growth. But Russian growth has been sputtering — and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction.
.. And if authoritarian regimes without deep legitimacy are tempted to rattle sabers when they can no longer deliver good performance, think about the incentives China’s rulers will face if and when that nation’s economic miracle comes to an end — something many economists believe will happen soon.