Recently, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken a large number of actions to crack down on Chinese companies in such businesses as tutoring, Internet, and food delivery. During an interview with the Epoch Times, Cheng Xiaonong, an expert on China issues, offered his views on Beijing’s secret agenda.
Cheng thinks Beijing is carrying out an agenda which he identifies as, “leaving the virtual business to return to real industry” (脱虚向实), without openly announcing it. The sectors that Beijing cracked down on are in the area of services, but not in the manufacturing industries which Beijing really wants to promote. China has a labor shortage for manufacturing jobs despite its having increased salaries. The number of China’s peasants who took manufacturing jobs in 2020 was 78 million, a drop of 10 million from 2016. Cheng estimated that China will lose 20 million peasant workers by 2025. The tutoring business employs 10 million workers (many of whom have college degrees) and the food delivery business also employs 10 million. Beijing might want to cut those areas to drive more people toward manufacturing jobs. (Editor’s note: Beijing has also started a wave of converting universities to vocational schools to produce more high-skilled technicians).
Cheng also thinks that the CCP has a secret agenda to decouple itself from the U.S. It wants to reduce China’s dependency on U.S. technology, the U.S. market, and the U.S. dollar. Therefore, it dares to beat those Chinese companies listed on different U.S. stock markets and see their stock prices falling. It no longer cares what Wall Street and the American investors think of China anymore.
Source: Epoch Times, August 25, 2021
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/21/8/25/n13185466.htm