China Gaoshou 中国高手, Mountain Man, Food Maven

  From China Dream to Nightmare for College Educated Chinese Youth: Chinese children have long made the following compact while growing up.   They bury their heads in their books and study like crazy from a very early age up through high school to get ahead in China’s ultracompetitive education system, causing them to miss out on the fun and play of a normal childhood.   By making this sacrifice, these kids can gain admission into a top-flight university and obtain stable and remunerative white-collar jobs, thereby avoiding the drudgery and insecurity of blue-collar work or a life of grinding poverty in rural villages.   Unfortunately, in recent years, particularly after the Covid Pandemic, this compact has broken down. The jobless rate among urban Chinese aged 16-24 rose sharply this summer, reaching 17.8% in July  (the August data has yet to be released).  The July figure was the highest since August 2024 and was well above the 14% youth unemployment le...

  CHINA’S SUMMER OF ECONOMIC MISERY: “April is the cruelest month,” or so begins T. S. Eliot’s bleak modernist masterpiece poem, “The Wasteland.”   After seeing China’s July 2025 economic data, Chinese Government officials would certainly beg to differ with Elliot.   The numbers in July were dreadful and came on the heels of a string of disappointing monthly data drops, making it arguably the cruelest month yet this year for the Chinese economy.   Deflationary pressure persisted, retail sales and industrial output came in below forecasts, with a sharp fall in steel production, urban unemployment edged up, investment activity contracted sharply, and the long-running real estate slump continued.   Starting with the July price data , the producer price index (PPI) dropped 3.6% year-on-year, according to National Bureau of Statistics data.   This fall was greater than the 3.3% slide forecasted in a Reuters poll of economists and matched the nearly two-year lo...