Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: A major newspaper blames the popular card game guandan for fueling official corruption, the United States removes a Chinese laser manufacturer from a Pentagon blacklist, and two major releases cap off a big summer for Chinese video games.
The CCP’s Informal Ties That Bind
A major newspaper in China’s capital, the Beijing Youth Daily, recently launched a barrage of sharp criticism against a popular card game—blaming officials who play guandan for slacking off, conspiring for personal gain, and building corrupt relationships. The coverage is a tone shift that shows how easily things in China can now become politicized.
Guandan was invented in the 1960s in Jiangsu province as a spinoff of another game; the provincial government has sought to promote the game for years, listing it as intangible cultural heritage in 2014. Last year, guandan surged in popularity after being featured in the 2023 Spring Festival Gala, China’s most watched television program. It now has an estimated 140 million players nationally.
Until now, the game seemed to enjoy only praise, hailed as a superior alternative to games such as poker. In China, betting is seen as a persistent social evil, and illegal gambling is common; crucially, guandan doesn’t inherently involve money. It is a trick-taking game that involves a lot of counting. Originally, the name meant “throwing bombs,” but it was gently euphemized to the homophonous “throwing eggs” (although the game’s hands are still referred to as bombs).
So, why the sudden turn? In the last year, guandan has also become a popular vehicle for building relationships for both Chinese officials and businesspeople—boosting the kind of social connections that are strongly associated with corruption. The game has come to enjoy a similar status among Chinese financial professionals to so-called liar’s poker on Wall Street. These professionals are currently in the crosshairs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Communist ideology also treats factions within the party as one of the biggest political threats, leading to regular campaigns against so-called cliques. Likewise, the Beijing Youth Daily articles condemn guandan as creating “gangs,” “cliques” and other such dangers. Other pastimes have previously faced similar crackdowns in China, including golf.
Yet, like any organization, the CCP depends on connections beyond its normal hierarchies to function—especially given the party’s culture of secrecy and its reluctance to share information through formal channels. Since at least 2004, party leadership has attempted to introduce a “culture of transparency” to formally counteract the party’s opacity.
But in practice, the habits of secrecy are deeply ingrained—and calls for such transparency sit uneasily alongside fears of espionage and growing censorship.
As a result, informal politics have often been more important than formal politics within the CCP. Friendly personal ties allow things to get done, but they also provide potential for officials to scheme against their superiors and get around hierarchy. That poses a particular danger for the party leadership, given growing questions about Xi Jinping’s rule since China’s COVID-19 crisis and economic slowdown.
Consider also the shadow of card-playing former leader Deng Xiaoping, who used his social skills to build extensive networks even while facing formal censure during the Cultural Revolution. Deng favored bridge, meeting regularly with other officials to play and scheme. Those networks helped him plot the coup against the Gang of Four that ended the Maoist era and eventually to take power himself. In his nominal retirement in the 1990s, when he still maintained control of China, the only formal title Deng kept was chairman of the China Bridge Association.
As political scientist Wen-Ti Sung pointed out last week, the guandan ban is part of a pattern of pushing the blame for China’s faltering economy and poor governance onto the failings of individual authorities rather than the leadership. “A recreational hobby is being politicized as a sign of economic unproductivity and political cronyism, which gets connected to poor performance and political corruption, which entails disobedience to leadership’s calls for more cadet moral purity & discipline,” Sung noted on X.
It’s not clear where China’s top leadership falls on guandan yet. The Beijing Youth Daily is a relatively important outlet, but it is not at the very top of the hierarchy. An earlier shot at guandan from the Beijing News in January went nowhere. Some local papers have already pushed back, and the biggest outlets haven’t weighed in.
However, there are reports that internal bans have already gone out to officials, and people have shared an image of a supposed form requiring officials to report any cliques formed through gaming. It may be time for Chinese officials to get a new hobby. Have they tried studying Xi Jinping Thought together?
What We’re Following
U.S. reverses blacklist decision. The Financial Times on Monday reported that the U.S. Defense Department will remove Chinese laser sensor manufacturer Hesai from a blacklist after officials decided that it couldn’t defend the ban in court. The company accounts for roughly 47 percent of the global market for LiDAR technology—an advanced form of detection that uses pulsed lasers rather than sound (as with radar).
Hesai was added to the blacklist in January based on 2021 U.S. legislation that targets China’s so-called civil-military fusion strategy. It immediately sued in response, but it was not the first company to be removed: Chinese phone manufacturer Xiaomi got itself taken off the list in 2021.
On the one hand, the move is mildly embarrassing for the Pentagon, making the initial justification for Hesai’s inclusion seem thin. On the other hand, it is a useful sign for Chinese companies that the list isn’t entirely arbitrary and that there are steps that they can take to avoid inclusion.
Russian bank bans. Banking between China and Russia is becoming more difficult, with small Chinese banks once willing to work with Russian partners increasingly backing off due to U.S. sanctions. Larger Chinese banks suspended trading after the United States introduced more secondary sanctions last December.
The last holdout acted after further sanctions were extended in June; smaller banks are rapidly following suit. Russian outlet Kommersant reports that roughly 80 percent of bank transfers between the two countries are being returned to Russia. The changes have led to a yuan liquidity crisis in Russia, with banks resorting to third-party maneuvers to try to cover the shortfall.
Tech and Business
Video game launches. It’s a big summer for Chinese video games—one of the country’s biggest, though often battered, markets. The public loves video games, while the CCP, as ever, fears fun and often targets the industry. That means that although Chinese firms, especially Tencent, are heavily invested in foreign studios, China has produced few global hits.
The exception is Genshin Impact, a massively popular gacha game, a genre originating in Japan. These games are free to play, but players are encouraged to buy randomized loot boxes that give in-game benefits. For Genshin Impact, that has led to more than $5 billion in income. The publisher’s follow-up, Zenless Zone Zero, was released last month and has already gathered a substantial player base and glowing reviews.
However, the release of the long-anticipated Black Myth: Wukong next week may mark a real breakthrough. Black Myth, based around the ever popular character of the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), is the first big pitch by a Chinese studio for a global AAA game—high-budget and slickly produced like a blockbuster movie. Early previews of the game are good, although the studio’s history of sexism may draw criticism.
EV breakthrough. China reached a milestone for green technology in July, as electric and hybrid vehicles overtook internal combustion engine vehicles in sales for the first time ever. China, the world’s largest auto market, has invested heavily in EVs, helping to drive down prices amid fierce competition—which has given them a sales boost despite weak overall auto sales this summer.
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A Bit of Culture
Throughout Chinese history, most people heard famous stories rather than reading them. For a premodern society, literacy in China was often relatively high, but storytellers were the norm, drawing audiences from across the spectrum. Below, Ming dynasty writer Zhang Dai (1597-1684) describes the skill of one such in-demand master of tales.—Brendan O’Kane, translator
Excerpt From Dream-Memories
By Zhang Dai
Liu Jingting of Nanjing had a dark, pockmarked face, an easy manner, a scorn for all pretense and affectation, and a rare talent for storytelling. He would tell one episode a day, charging as his fee one ounce of silver, and had to be booked—with retainer—10 days in advance. Even this was subject to availability, which (since he was one of Nanjing’s two most in-demand performers, along with the chanteuse Wang Yuesheng) was rare.
I once heard him tell the story of how the outlaw Wu Song killed the tiger on Jingyang Ridge. It was very different from the version in the book. Liu described every detail vividly and precisely, with never a word too many, in a voice that rang out like a massive bell, and at key moments he would let loose a bellow that shook the rafters. At the part where Wu Song gets to the inn and finds nobody there to serve him, Liu roared so ferociously that all the empty pots and jugs kept on ringing after he was done.
Even the parts where nothing happened were lively in his telling.
Liu would not open his mouth until his hosts were sitting quietly and listening with bated breath, and if there was any hint of whispering among the servants or any sign of yawning or flagging interest in the audience, he would immediately stop speaking and refuse all entreaties to resume. Often, he would continue his tales past midnight, as servants wiped the tables, trimmed the lamps, and served tea in tasteful porcelain cups.
Liu’s pacing and intonation were always perfectly suited to the characters and their situations, and if one could have grabbed every other storyteller in the world and dragged them by the ears to listen to him, I have no doubt but that they would have been struck dumb if not dead with amazement.