W15 - The Dilemma

I am in Datong, a small city that Beijing has blocked and banned entry to. Datong has had no new cases for nearly 14 days, and all rail and road entries to Beijing have been halted. Shanghai sees over 20,000 cases a day, yet it still maintains a pair of daily high-speed trains. This is the reality a city that normally has only about 2,000 daily personnel exchanges with Beijing must face.

An unknown nobody. Like many border towns in Yunnan hit by the pandemic, this is unrelated to regional economic development and irrelevant to international supply chain security.

Self-reliance. I tried options like rail transfers and road travel, but each time staff forcibly refunded my tickets, as if I were trying to petition in Beijing. I called 12345, 12306, and the local epidemic control office and felt like I was in a football match. No one could give the conditions for entering Beijing or a definite recovery time. I reluctantly posted “a few words to the Premier” on the State Council app.

The outbreak at the Yunda logistics park in Taiyuan turned the health codes of more than two million people across Shanxi red overnight, and then came what I experienced in the past few days. Mass nucleic acid testing, successive escalations by administrative units at all levels, which caused public panic, hoarding of supplies, and emptied supermarket shelves. My father even withdrew tens of thousands in cash from the bank, fearing a run. It was almost absurd; for a while I couldn’t tell whether this was a natural disaster or a man-made one.

Fortunately, Datong has had no confirmed cases since April 2, and the tense atmosphere comes in pulses. I also have a job I can support remotely. More importantly, I have a home to return to and am with my parents.

This weekend the Wudaokou Financial Forum was successfully held, and I caught parts of the livestream intermittently. I had an opportunity to attend in person but couldn’t, which was a regret. I focused on the fintech session Sunday afternoon. Maybe because the forum was winding down and many leaders were absent, the last few speeches delivered high-level dialogue. Hymns of praise grew rarer until Yan Yan took the stage; his talk reached the highest level of the forum and evoked the style of Professor Ma at the old Lujiazui Forum.

I didn’t know much about this prominent figure before, so I looked him up—he’s an interesting person. He once jumped a queue, majored in aircraft design as an undergraduate, and worked as an engineer for two years. Later he studied under the renowned Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong at Beijing Normal University. In the 1990s he earned a PhD in International Economic and Political Studies from Princeton and later worked at the World Bank. His primary role now is partner at SAIF (Seekr Fund).

Regardless of its structure, his speech at the Wudaokou Forum had intentions beyond the surface; here are a few examples to convey that sense.

• The speaker before him argued that, on the macro level, financing for China’s private enterprises has greatly improved and inclusive finance has yielded results. Yan Yan immediately refuted that view. His gist was that researchers must go to the grassroots and not rely on macro aggregates. Structurally, most loans to private enterprises have been taken by real estate firms, leaving micro and small businesses with worse financing conditions and severely damaged real operating situations.

• Since he started investing, he has witnessed China’s tech industry market capitalization grow from zero to $5 trillion and then fall back to $1 trillion from last year to now. He said he doesn’t understand the logic of why tech has suffered this fate.

• As for what will next drive social progress, it may not be something you can solve—resolving this could well produce multiple Nobel Prizes.

• The economic impact of the pandemic is already visible to the naked eye; meeting this year’s 5.5% growth target now depends on the statistics bureau.

Before closing my notes and after a sip of tea, I habitually checked ticket availability and, miraculously, tickets were released. I happily went to get my nucleic acid test.