S8 Ep270: STAGNATION UNDER SURVEILLANCE Colleague Anne Stevenson-Yang, Wild Ride. The severe lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic shattered consumer confidence, leaving citizens insecure and unwilling to spend, which stalled economic recovery. Local governments, cut

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

STAGNATION UNDER SURVEILLANCE Colleague Anne Stevenson-Yang, Wild Ride. The severe lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic shattered consumer confidence, leaving citizens insecure and unwilling to spend, which stalled economic recovery. Local governments, cut off from credit and burdened by debt, struggle to provide basic services. Faced with economic stagnation, Xi Jinping has rejected market liberalization in favor of increased surveillance and control, prioritizing regime security over resolving the structural debt crisis or restoring the dynamism of previous decades. NUMBER 8

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0:00.0	I'm John Batchez, CBSI on the world. Ann Stevenson Yang is here. Her new book is Wild Ride,
0:06.4	a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. We're at in 2020 COVID hits.
0:12.6	We know the story is shut down of the Chinese economy, seal the apartment buildings in some
0:18.9	instances, quite severe. And the Chinese people are rattled.
0:23.7	At the same time, there is a financial crisis that accompanies the shutting down of not just the
0:28.7	Chinese economy, but the global economy. We're still recovering. And all of the bad credit that is now
0:35.9	out there cannot be serviced easily. What is to be done? It's not just the
0:41.3	ghost cities because I have this fact from Ann's reporting. 25% of the GDP that's been reported
0:49.8	all these years is based upon the real estate. Those projects out there, the miracles, and the miracles have stopped, and deflation
1:00.4	sets in, and also a distrust entirely of authority.
1:06.7	And that's where we are right now looking at this model of recovery.
1:10.5	The expectation, Anne, was that as the U.S. recovered... And that's where we are right now looking at this model of recovery.
1:18.0	The expectation, Anne, was that as the U.S. recovered, as Europe recovered from the pandemic, China would as well.
1:19.4	What's holding it back?
1:20.7	Why hasn't it recovered?
1:28.9	Well, I think that a lot of people came out of these very, very severe lockdowns quite disappointed in the government because, you know, internationally, people got money while they had to stay home and leave
1:35.3	their jobs. But in China, that didn't happen. And so they come out of these lockups and they find,
1:40.6	well, now I feel very insecure about the future. Is this going to happen again? And I don't
1:46.2	have more money in my pocket. I think I better hold on to what I have in case something bad
1:51.2	happens again. And the response by the central government, Xi Jinping, was to increase surveillance,
1:59.0	was to distrust everybody, was to worry about protests?
2:02.4	There was that moment.
	...

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