Editor’s note for Friday, March 12, 2021
A note from the editor of today's The China Project Access newsletter.
My thoughts today:
A tale of two pandemics: I last saw him before the pandemic, a friend of mine who works for a Chinese manufacturer that sells plastic crap to Americans, and we caught up last week. He told me that he had never been so busy in his life as the past year, as his company fulfilled hundreds of thousands of orders for outdoor furniture, cheap household gadgets, and other stuff that people in lockdowns across the United States bought.
This is one of themes of a new Peter Hessler article in the New Yorker, which looks at the booming economy of Chinese companies that make stuff solely to sell on Amazon.com. Money quote:
After the U.S. government issued stimulus checks, โthe next day we saw an increase in sales,โ a Chinese businessman said.
As Chinese entrepreneurs make plans to get their share of the next stimulus program, CNBC features Mark Cuban, famous entrepreneur, recommending Americans who do not need to use the upcoming stimmie checks on essentials instead โpay off debtโ rather than spend it on junk. And so the drunken Chimerica dance goes onโฆ
Our word of the day is the unappetising new Chinese word for ghost or cloud kitchens that make food for app-based restaurant delivery services: fly restaurants (่่้ค้ฆ cฤngying cฤnguวn).
โJeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief
