Editor’s note for Thursday, August 5, 2021

My thoughts today:

Xi Jinping’s brain is one way you might characterize Wáng Hùníng 王沪宁. Wang is “regarded by many as the brain behind the throne, the mandarin behind the emperor,” according to one scholar. If that is true, it certainly makes sense to understand how Wang thinks. Here is one piece of the puzzle, via a Twitter thread from translator Dylan Levi King, of which this section caught my eye:

Wang Huning explains American political parties, as they looked to him in the late 1980s…

“The position of the self-proclaimed socialist organizations is quite low.” The appeal of global Marxism was quite limited in 1988. The capitalists won, he says — maybe not ideologically, but developmentally, feeding the most people, which is all anyone really cares about.

As long as capitalism ticks along and socialist systems prove unreliable, everything’s fine. But if a day should come when there’s near economic parity between East and West, the ideological battle will be on, at which point the radicals will not be given such free rein.

So, again, the reason to read this is not for fresh analysis, exactly, but because the lens we’re seeing 1988 American politics through is interesting, and it tells us something about the man that would return home and help shape Chinese politics for the next three or so decades.

We’ve been adding to our Guide to China’s Big Tech crackdown, and have added a timeline and tracker to it so you can stay on top of the story or chase up individual companies or sectors.

We’ve also been buffing up our Edge database of Chinese company profiles: Get the essential facts about all kinds of entities from China National Offshore Oil Corporation to ByteDance with a click. If you don’t find a company you’re looking for, just email me or follow the prompt on the website to request it.

Speaking of the tech crackdown, it looks like gaming is going to be less profitable in China in the future, and the vaping business is probably going to, er, go up in smoke (see the links in our Business and Technology section below).

I am not normally a cracky-downy kind of guy, but as a parent of young children in an age of screens, and an ex-smoker who has been fighting addiction to nicotine in all its forms my entire adult life, I fully support any coming Chinese government actions to destroy both video games and e-cigarettes!

Upcoming events:

• August 12: The results of the U.S.-China Business Council member survey.
• August 19: How to use your China skills to climb the corporate ladder.

Our word of the day is e-cigarette (电子烟 diànzǐ yān).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief