Editor’s note for Tuesday, October 26, 2021

My thoughts today:

Last week, we had a The China Project Zoom chat on the Red New Deal: “Entertainment and Culture under Xi Jinping’s Nanny State” (video here) in which we asked: What are China’s kids and teenagers expected to do with all their free time now that video gaming and after school tutoring are effectively banned.

The answer, of course, is sport. Government initiatives like those that Jiayun Feng writes about below to encourage China’s youth to get active are just getting going. Mens sana in corpore sano is Latin for a “healthy mind in a healthy body.” We’ll probably learn some Chinese equivalents of that phrase from Xi Jinping in the coming months.

Sports may also offer a path forward for the tutoring companies that are now going out of business because they are not allowed to offer after-school academic classes. In Jiayun’s story today, a government sports official actually urges schools to pay sports clubs to organize classes for students — this would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It also would have been unpalatable to most Chinese parents, but perhaps that has changed.

Our word of the day is the real estate developer Modern Land: 当代置业 dāngdài zhìyè.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief