Why Is the CCP Afraid of You Talking About U.S. Stocks? Because They Are a Ruler: The CSI 300 Underperformed the S&P 500 by More Than 80 Percentage Points Over Three Years, and the 10-Year Treasury Yield Fell Below 1.8%. Hide the Ruler and You Can't See How Short You Are. The Blockade Itself Is the Most Valuable Information

This episode delves into the phenomenon of the Cyberspace Administration of China strictly prohibiting the dissemination and discussion of overseas investment topics such as U.S. stocks. The host analyzes the regime's anxiety behind this move: the performance of overseas assets like U.S. stocks and the Nasdaq serves as a realistic "ruler" for measuring the cost-performance ratio of China's economy and assets, while dismal data such as the CSI 300 Index underperforming the S&P 500 and the 10-year Treasury bond yield falling below 1.8% make it difficult for authorities to face reality. Comparing economic data falsification before the collapse of the former Soviet Union with grassroots "underground macro data transmission protocols" (such as political jokes and samizdat), and combining metrics like satellite nighttime lighting indices, local fiscal self-sufficiency rates (such as the tight fiscal conditions in cities like Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Chongqing), and special bond interest-paying pressures, the program provides an in-depth analysis of the real predicament facing China's economy and finance, pointing out that information blockade itself is the truest negative signal.

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Observe things as they are, reject fragmented understanding. Yesterday, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a news item, fuck! After reading it, my reaction was that the CCP has gone completely fucking crazy, to the point where even the words "U.S. stocks" are almost becoming sensitive terms. Hey, I'm not kidding, look at this: prohibiting the dissemination and discussion of overseas investment topics like U.S. stocks, as well as content related to the United States. Think about it carefully: doesn't the CCP constantly boast about all kinds of confidence, like institutional confidence, the fourfold confidence of the regime, yet it is actually scared shitless by ordinary folks chatting on their phones about the Nasdaq? So what kind of fucking idiot is the CCP right now? Hey, let's imagine this, hey, it's just like because the neighbor Lao Wang's kid scored well on an exam, you burn down your own kid's report card overnight. The CCP is truly fucking magical right now; a regime with genuine confidence in itself is not afraid of you looking outside. The more they cover things up, the more it proves what? The more it shows they have something shameful to hide. The very act of blocking delivers the most valuable information to you. Look, right after sealing off the physical channels of brokerages, the CCP is now starting to seal off information channels.

We've said enough about the blockade of the three major brokerages. Today, let's focus on what kind of fucked-up mindset the CCP regime has right now. Actually, what really deserves attention is that sentence in the plan, which black-and-white lists internet platforms and domestic self-media as targets for rectification, and even specifically names accounts that post account-opening tutorials or share such experiences. Translated into plain human language: the pipeline for money must be pinched, and the pipeline for mouths must be pinched even tighter. And this is not a one-time deal; if you stretch out this timeline, the problem becomes crystal clear. In 2025, they ran that Qinglang campaign to rectify self-media, coming up with some regulation that finance, medical, and legal sectors aren't allowed to speak without qualifications. Then by September of last year, platforms like Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Kuaishou were all lined up and invited to "tea sessions." Later on, even pessimistic sentiments about the Chinese economy—yes, exactly, emotions—were officially listed as targets for crackdown, making it so people aren't even allowed to sigh; they've even got their damn hands on that pipe. I suggest submitting this level of granularity straight to the Guinness World Records. After this combination punch, for ordinary people to openly discuss U.S. stocks or overseas interest rates has escalated from being uncost-effective to being downright suicidal. Although the CCP hasn't officially banned you from speaking via law, the practical effect is that your mouths have been welded shut.

Alright, let's get to the core issue: why did the term "US stocks" precisely step on the tail of the CCP? This has to start with a most basic common sense in finance: for anything to have a value, you need a reference point. Look at things like A-share stocks in China, real estate, or those junk local government financing vehicle (LGFV) bonds and wealth management products—whether these things are valuable or not has never been something that can be decided behind closed doors. Over the past five or six years, smart investors in China have long learned to use the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, and 10-year US Treasury bonds as a ruler to measure the cost-performance ratio of Chinese assets. As the saying goes, "Comparisons are odious." This creates an awkward situation because the results measured by this ruler are simply too ugly. The CSI 300 has cumulatively underperformed the S&P 500 by over 80 percentage points over the past few years, and housing prices in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen have already fallen back to 2017 levels. Furthermore, China's 10-year government bond yield has fallen below 1.8%; the current level of Chinese government bonds is priced for a deep recession. Meanwhile, US Treasury bonds are firmly above 4%. What kind of scene is this? It's like a class organizing an exam: your child scores 58, and you could originally brush it off by saying "participation is what matters," but then the neighbor's child scores 98 and posts their test paper in the group chat every day. If you had the mindset of a normal person, how would you tutor the child? You'd find a tutoring class, right? Fix the weak spots. But what is the CCP's approach? Well, it's "where there's a problem, point it out"—literally, just pointing at it.

Some might say, how many people actually play the US stock market? True, the number of mainland users with compliant holdings through offshore brokers is at most around 900,000, less than 0.5% of the over 200 million retail investors. But take note: the "verbal firepower" of these 900,000 people cannot be measured by headcount alone. They are the ones writing on Zhihu, posting on Xiaohongshu, and hanging out on X; they are the bona fide influencers for household assets. Gagging this group is equivalent to pulling the signal source. This logic is the same as turning off the alarm to stop the fire. It is exactly the same—very brave and very fucking stupid, but useless. Therefore, we can see that the CCP is currently very anxious, and this anxiety is not just on the surface; it has three layers. I have mapped it out for you: the first layer is the anxiety over asset pricing power. As long as people still use US stocks as a benchmark, the policies for A-shares won't hold up. Because A-shares are not essentially a market; they are a performance stage for confidence. And confidence is relative. By hiding the US stock "ruler," the CCP can at least temporarily prevent people from seeing how short they really are. The second layer is the anxiety over capital flight. By 2026, household deposits have already exceeded 170 trillion yuan. These 170 trillion yuan are money trapped in a cage. To the CCP, this liquidity is something in their pocket—it is the final ammunition for destocking, debt resolution, and stability maintenance. Any information that lets this money see other high-quality investment channels is now considered contraband in the eyes of the CCP. The third layer is the anxiety over currency and exchange rates. Look at the total quota for QDII; it's only 176.2 billion USD, with stock-related ones at 97.3 billion USD. Among the 330 QDII products in the entire market, over 60% have restricted purchases or are suspended. And what's even more ridiculous is that the daily purchase limit for Nasdaq index funds is 10 or 100 yuan. Fucking hell, if you know what's going on, you know it's a financial product; if you don't, you'd think you were scrambling for discounted eggs at a supermarket. Moreover, a run on these already happened in 2024. The premiums on domestic US stock ETFs have been inverted by double digits for a long time. Let me give you another absurd figure: do you remember that E Fund MSCI USA 50 QDII ETF? In 2024, the premium once broke through 40%. What does this mean? It means for a basket of US assets worth 100 yuan, you have to obediently pay 140 yuan in the market to buy it. That 40% isn't because people are fucking stupid; it's the massive premium paid to the CCP for the blocked foreign exchange demand. So, starting from 2024, it has precisely told you one thing: the pool of foreign exchange reserves is almost dry.

Speaking of which, we must invite an old friend of behavioral finance—yes, that famous Diamond-Dybvig bank run model. What is its core mechanism called? It is called coordination failure. You see, for individual depositors, if they do not run on the bank themselves, nothing happens. But if they can see each other queuing up, a bank run can be completed within a few hours. The flash collapse of Silicon Valley Bank within 48 hours in 2023 is a living textbook of lightning-fast bank runs in the social media era. So, when you look back at those "Clean Up the Internet" campaigns and the mass account bans of big influencers on Xueqiu, you instantly understand: they are not banning speech at all; what the CCP is banning is the window through which investors can see each other. If you can't see others running, you won't run yourself, and then, the bank run won't happen—a closed logical loop. But the only problem is, replacing "fixing the fundamentals" with "forbidding people from saying the fundamentals are bad" is itself equivalent to broadcasting to the entire market: the fundamentals are fucking ruined. Fortunately, the folks at the Cyberspace Administration of China are a bunch of fucking idiots, or perhaps they are extremely clever agents of malicious compliance. Isn't this the ultimate financial version of "protesting too much"?

Why do I say this bunch of CCP crooks are a bunch of dumbasses? Because this trick was proven ineffective empirically long ago! Has there been a similar "physical network disconnection" style operation in history? Yes, and it was the granddaddy of them all: the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse. Let's look at a set of data. According to a declassified 1987 CIA internal memorandum on the Soviet Union, there was a very, very large gap between the growth rate of machine industry output officially published by the Soviet Union and the real growth rate estimated by the CIA. Look, I have automatically generated a chart, see? From 1981 to 1985, the Soviet Communist Party claimed that machine output grew by 6.2%, while the real data estimated by the CIA was only 1.7%—a full difference of 4.5 percentage points. The most hilarious part is not bragging in a single year, but bragging continuously for decades, with this gap steadily maintained at 4 to 5 percentage points. The fucking idiot brothers seem to love the number five, probably because of some connection to the Soviet Union, or maybe it's maternal atavism—you really are a fucking good grandson of the Soviet Communist Party. To what extent has it reached now? Even the style of academic fraud in China has been completely warped by these fucking idiot brothers. Look at those experimental data; don't they look like five from the side, five from the front, and five from near and far? It's the data version of "King Ling of Chu loved slender waists, so many in his court starved to death."

Alright, let's get back to the point. So, this is not a statistical error at all; this is the fucking ancestral craft of the communist bandits, their craftsmanship spirit. Gorbachev himself laid his cards on the table in 1990. How did he do it? He said that the actual income of Soviet citizens was only about 40% of that of Americans, but the figure the Soviet Communist Party had bragged about to the outside world for decades was 64%. Squeezing out this 24 percentage point water could recreate an Eastern Europe. So, were the Soviet citizens just fooled like that? Not really. Even in the absence of legal information channels, the Soviet public managed to invent a "three-piece suit." What did this three-piece suit constitute? I think it should be called an underground macro-data transmission protocol. Let's see what this three-piece suit is. The first is Samizdat. What does it mean? It refers to the underground copying and distribution of banned books or articles using hand-copied manuscripts or typewriters with carbon paper. The second is kitchen and toilet politics. If something was not allowed to be said in public, people would slip into their own five- or six-square-meter kitchens or toilets to have a heart-to-heart chat. So in the late Soviet period, kitchens and toilets became incubators for the truth. The third is the most brilliant: Soviet jokes. This was the most efficient compressed package of truth back then. Let me decompress a few for you to appreciate. "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." This single sentence strips the pants off the Soviet Union's productivity statistics. And there is also that joke about Brezhnev's train, which I assume you have all heard. What is it about? It says the train broke down. Lenin said to organize voluntary labor; Stalin was more direct and said to shoot the driver; Khrushchev said to dismantle the tracks behind and lay them in front. When it was Brezhnev's turn, he just waved his hand: "Comrades, draw the curtains, turn on the gramophone, and pretend we are still moving forward!" So Brezhnev—the Soviet Emperor—and the fucking idiot Emperor You Xi have the most similar styles. What else? Like "There is no truth in Pravda (Truth), and no news in Izvestia (News)." Have you noticed? These jokes are not just for amusement; they carry information. They are reverse macroeconomic indicators spontaneously generated by the public. Therefore, we can see that the denser and darker a society's political jokes are, the more watered-down the official data usually is.

So, when was this bill finally settled? It was after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, when the CPSU covered it up for a full 18 days. During this period, Sweden, over 700 miles away, even detected this skyrocketing radiation, and the whole world knew about it, while the Soviet people at home were still kept in the dark and then told that the May Day parade would be held as usual. The most despicable thing was making Soviet children at the time endure this radiation and joyfully greet these fucking idiot leaders. So I think Gorbachev's remark was, well, I think it was right. He said that compared to my reforms, Chernobyl might truly be the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. The mechanism here actually applies just as well to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). What is this mechanism like? It is that under long-term blockades, trust is not worn away little by little; rather, the pressure of long-term suppression collides with a detonating point, which equals what? It equals an overnight avalanche. This equation will certainly be fulfilled on the CCP as well. If we must put it that way, Chernobyl was just a match, but the pile of firewood was the pile of lies accumulated by the CPSU for decades. Some people might ask, now that we have AI, well, won't the situation be different? This is indeed a new variable, and what's more, both sides can exert force. This side of the CCP can use large models to generate millions of pieces of positive energy information in a second, locking them into this information flow, and can also identify netizen commentary. But on the side of the ordinary people, they can also use open-source large models for local deployment, and then use encrypted communication combined with overseas large models to puncture this Great Firewall in reverse. What is the conclusion? Back in the Soviet era, they didn't even have a smartphone, didn't it still collapse anyway? It is a very simple question: when the fundamentals rot to a certain extent, even the most advanced blockade only presses a snooze reminder for this collapse, rather than canceling it. AI gagging can make this matter more refined, but it also makes puncturing this wall more effortless. The net effect is that this game will only be played faster, but the ending will not change, because anything with a negative return cannot be distorted in the long term, and the longer the distortion lasts, the fiercer the reckoning will come.

Well, let's pull our lens back to today. Since the CCP has reached the point of not even allowing people to mention the name outside, let's deduce it backwards: just how rotten is the family fortune in the CCP's pockets, and how much water has been injected into the CCP's GDP? Isn't the CCP afraid of people talking? Originally, I wanted to say something else, but seeing the news about this lunatic, fuck, I'm energized. Well, let's look at the hardest scales for measuring China's economic growth, and let's properly weigh China's economy. I will put several of the hardest estimates together, and furthermore, I will not only verify your present, CCP, I will fucking verify your history as well. The Brookings Institution had a famous forensic accounting paper in 2019. What conclusion did they calculate? It was that from 2008 to 2016, the CCP's GDP growth rate was overestimated by an average of 1.7 percentage points, and by 2016, the entire economic volume was about 12 percent smaller than the CCP's figures. Coupled with satellite night lights, plus back then Premier Li Keqiang himself only believed in the Li Keqiang Index—well, that is the cross-reference of those three things: electricity consumption, railway freight, and bank loans—all these indicators pointed in the same direction, which is that the true growth rate of China's economy, at its most optimistic, is only about half of the CCP's stated caliber. However, after squeezing out the water, China's economic growth rate should be between minus 1 percent and plus 1 percent, because this level of economic growth is more consistent with China's current 10-year treasury bond yield situation.

Alright, now that we've covered the water-filled national figures, let's switch to a more incisive perspective. Let's focus specifically on those star cities you assume are the wealthiest and most respectable. Now, let's strip away their fiscal underwear. First, let's introduce a concept called the fiscal self-sufficiency rate. Simply put, it's whether the money a city earns itself is enough to cover its own expenses. If it's below 100%, it means they can't fully cover their costs and have to reach out to the central government for handouts or loans. Look at this ranking, starting with the full year of 2025. You calculate it—there isn't a single place in the country with a fiscal self-sufficiency rate reaching 100%, including Shanghai and Shenzhen, which everyone thinks are rich. Shenzhen is at 92.5%, and Shanghai is at 85.2%. However, you have to put a question mark next to Shenzhen's 92.5%. Shenzhen's total fiscal revenue for 2025 was 416.38 billion, which is true, it grew by 0.4%, but in the same year, the Shenzhen government requested 65.32 billion in transfer payments from the central government. Hey, only with this figure does the number start to look decent. In other words, even a city like Shenzhen has to rely on transfer payments to keep its books looking good. Immediately following that, three major municipalities—all bottomless pits—have plunged into the red zone. Tianjin's self-sufficiency rate has fallen directly to 60%, Wuhan is just over 50%, and the most outrageous one is Chongqing. In 2025, it earned 273.58 billion itself, but how much did this single municipality spend in a year? Over 570 billion. Its self-sufficiency rate is not even half, only about 48.7%. That year's deficit was that year's deficit—over 300 billion. What's even more brazen is that the quality of these cities' earnings is deteriorating very, very rapidly. Chongqing's revenue in 2025 grew by 5.4%, but if you peel back the tax layer, it only climbed by 2.3%, while non-tax revenue surged by 9.9%. The national ledger is even clearer: in 2025, tax revenue barely grew by 0.8%; the money collected from legitimate business operations is basically stagnant. What's propping up the facade? It's the securitization of state-owned assets, all sorts of fucking fees, and the price hikes for water, electricity, and gas. But is that the end of it? Not yet, there's something even more ruthless. These cities have borrowed so much money that they can barely pay the interest. Among the 70 large and medium-sized cities, eight had interest payments on special-purpose bonds exceeding 10 billion in 2025: Chongqing at 31.3 billion and Tianjin at 29.7 billion. But the most explosive one is Zhengzhou. Zhengzhou's interest payments on special-purpose bonds have already accounted for 60.67% of its government fund expenditures. What does this mean? The CCP has a regulation, but this regulation has basically never been followed. What is this regulation? It's that if the interest payment ratio exceeds 10% of fiscal revenue, it triggers a fiscal reorganization red line. And Zhengzhou has six red lines. How does a report from Yuekai Securities put it? It says that the statutory debt ratios of Tianjin, Jilin, Guizhou, and Chongqing all exceed 200%, and they have surged by more than 20 percentage points within a year. So now you understand, right? Why the fuck is the CCP acting like it's desperate for money everywhere lately? By the first quarter of 2026, in the execution figures disclosed by local finance bureaus, the three words "just balanced" have almost become the standard line. Although local-level revenue can still squeeze out a small growth on the books, it still relies on the same old recipe: non-tax revenue filling the gap, liquidating assets, and transfer payments covering the deficit. In other words, the situation in 2025 where they couldn't even support themselves is continuing to deteriorate at an accelerated pace in 2026.

So what will happen next? The conventional path—after interest rate cuts, reserve requirement ratio cuts, and money printing have all been exhausted—historical experience tells us that the script usually moves in a more ruthless direction. The next act with the highest probability is the escalation of foreign exchange controls. For example, the individual annual foreign exchange purchase quota of $50,000 will be slashed crazily, or perhaps a 48-hour "cooling-off period" will be added to your cross-border remittances. This isn't just to scare people. In Argentina from 2019 to 2024, the price difference between the official exchange rate and the black market dollar once reached as high as 200%; in Venezuela, the black market under control could differ from the official rate by dozens of times. Pushing it to the extreme, there is another historical precedent called mandatory settlement of foreign exchange—that is, confiscating hard currency. Many people may not know that the CCP played a currency reform in 1950. At that time, who did this currency reform learn from? It learned from the route of Chiang Kai-shek's "Gold Yuan" reform, stipulating that gold, silver, and foreign currency were not allowed to circulate, and private holdings had to be turned over to the CCP for exchange. This policy remained in effect until 2024, when the People's Bank of China finally allowed individuals to buy gold. I'm saying all this not to suggest it will definitely repeat, but I believe the CCP has no bottom line when it comes to doing things. We must understand one thing: when a regime starts to physically disconnect from the internet, the tools left in its toolbox are often these ancestral "heavy medicines."

Nowadays, the propaganda system of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whether in its narratives or data, has reached a point where you cannot even believe a single punctuation mark. So, as people who want to live with a clear mind, what should we look at? Well, here is a set of high-quality, alternative, high-frequency indicator panels for everyone. This is specifically designed to deconstruct whatever the CCP says. The first set is logistics and trade, which is the CCP's favorite area to brag and talk bullshit about. We must keep a close eye on the Baltic Dry Index (BDI). China accounts for about 40% of the global industry demand, and this thing is quoted daily in London. They don't care about what the CCP wants or doesn't want to hear; this is the mirror that least lies about China's physical demand. Then, keep an eye on South Korea, Vietnam, and US Customs imports from China. We can see that these data often do not match up. The second set, which is also the most hardcore, is production and fundamentals. Let's not look at those data that have been compiled through layers and magically modified by the fucking CCP's National Bureau of Statistics. Let's just look up at the sky and focus on the nighttime light index. The CCP can fake economic data, but they cannot fake real-time space imagery. There are two free websites for this. Of course, if you, the CCP, are really fucking awesome, you can keep the lights on all night and I won't mind. If you fucking spend a fortune just to pull off this fake, then I'll admit you are fucking awesome. What does the light data reflect most directly? It is whether the factories in the Yangtze River Delta are actually working overtime, whether the logistics parks in the Pearl River Delta are bustling in the middle of the night, and whether China's industrial zones go pitch black as soon as it hits 8 PM. The brightness of satellite images will give you the coldest and most direct raw answer. This is the ultimate way to distinguish the true from the false. If the CCP reports that industrial added value is still rising, but the nighttime brightness of the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta is falling, or even the lit areas are shrinking sharply, you should know that the CCP has started playing its ancestral craft again. The last set, which is also the most recent one, is capital flows. Previously, I have repeatedly emphasized the need to keep a close eye on the "errors and omissions" item in the balance of payments. What a fucking nice name they came up with—"errors and omissions"—making it sound like, oh, just an accident, right? And then, over a trillion US dollars just accidentally went out like that. Well, that is fucking too accidental. With these indicators, it would be hard for the fucking CCP to brag to you.

Therefore, the so-called ban on talking about US stocks has never been an isolated action, but a whole set of combined punches. The China Securities Regulatory Commission is responsible for pinching the purse strings, the Cyberspace Administration of China is responsible for welding mouths shut, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange directly shuts the gate. Basically, once these three things are done, the probability that the CCP is up to no good is close to 100%. And this kind of action, where even the name is not allowed to be mentioned, is itself reverse evidence that the family assets have rotted to a certain extent. Now it is really fucking awesome! Fucking US stocks have now received the same treatment as fucking Voldemort. In the future, when referring to US stocks, do we have to use "that stock" instead? Now, let me hammer home the opening sentence again: a regime that truly has confidence in itself is not afraid of you looking outside; the more it covers up, the more it shows that what is inside cannot face the light of day. That period of Soviet history is the best mirror to reveal the true form. Blockades may be able to delay a crisis, but they can never delay the final reckoning. When the blockade reaches an extreme and a major global trigger point appears, the avalanche of trust is calculated in seconds. For today's China, that Chernobyl moment has actually already happened once, which was the Wuhan pneumonia pandemic. And we can also see that from the discovery of this Wuhan pneumonia, to the outbreak, and then to the sudden lockdown, even the timing of the suppression was highly consistent with the process of the Chernobyl disaster. After Chernobyl, the Soviet Communist Party collapsed in five years. I would like to see how much longer the CCP can hold on before collapsing. And those fucking idiots at the CCP's Cyberspace Administration of China probably forgot that the blockade itself is information. When a country's National Bureau of Statistics, Cyberspace Administration of China, Securities Regulatory Commission, and State Administration of Foreign Exchange simultaneously fucking tighten control and forbid you from looking outside, it can only prove one thing: the real gap between the outside and the inside has already become so huge that they cannot afford to have people check the accounts face-to-face. This is not a conclusion I drew; this is the hole card that the fucking CCP showed itself, and the rest is just a matter of time.