{"id":3862,"date":"2011-03-23T04:16:50","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T10:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonapollovoss.local\/?p=3862"},"modified":"2018-09-21T02:07:50","modified_gmt":"2018-09-21T06:07:50","slug":"evidence-of-social-strain-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2011\/03\/23\/evidence-of-social-strain-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Evidence of Social Strain in China"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Yesterday the Chinese government in Beijing banned outdoor advertising (like billboards) that promotes, &#8220;hedonism, lavishness and the worship of foreign things.&#8221;\u00a0 The ban also prevents ads that are considered vulgar and that encourage an aristocratic lifestyle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">While on the surface this law appears to be about the wealthy, it is not.\u00a0 Instead this law is about the widening gap between the rich and poor in China.\u00a0 This is an issue that I highlighted in my <a href=\"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web2010\/12\/13\/what-my-intuition-tells-me-now-2011-predictions\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2011 Predictions<\/a> when I said, &#8220;The Chinese are on the brink of two ugly things: massive asset inflation and the bursting of that bubble, and social unrest.\u00a0 Expect to see social protests in China as the haves and have nots gap widens.\u00a0 In typical authoritarian fashion though, the protests will be convincingly squelched.\u00a0 Expect to hear, if not see the true, dark underbelly of China.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">For China the difficulty is that their social contract with their people is about to fracture.\u00a0 Chinese people have agreed to be repressed and have only one political party &#8211; the Communists &#8211; in exchange for a guarantee of employment.\u00a0 This means that Chinese businesses are not run for profitability, but for full employment; a situation that is not sustainable in the long run.\u00a0 Additionally, it means that as the gap widens between rich and poor, the overwhelming majority of people who are poor will begin to question their government.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Though I have scarcely reported on them, there have already been social protests in China this year.\u00a0 Today&#8217;s billboard ban is further evidence of increasing pressures within China.\u00a0 The increase in GDP per capita has been very uneven and eventually something has to give.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday the Chinese government in Beijing banned outdoor advertising (like billboards) that promotes, &#8220;hedonism, lavishness and the worship of foreign things.&#8221;\u00a0 The ban also prevents ads that are considered vulgar and that encourage an aristocratic lifestyle. While on the surface this law appears to be about the wealthy, it is not.\u00a0 Instead this law is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}