House Price Divided by Table Fee Is the City's P/E Ratio! Shanghai at 13.8 Times Crashes Through the Floor, Private Rooms Go From Coal Bosses to State-Owned Funds, Salt Merchant Licenses Breeded Yangzhou Thin Horses, What She Earns Isn't Skill but Cash in the Private Room, the Victim Isn't the Hostess but the Female Subordinate! The More Business Gets Done Over Commercial KTV, the Less You Should Invest There

This episode examines the business logic of China's commercial karaoke (KTV) industry, the price-earnings (P/E) ratio relationship between hostess service fees and housing prices, as well as historical salt merchants and comprador systems. It explores the phenomenon of franchising born from the alliance of power and capital, analyzes changes in China's economic leverage ratio, the current reality of P/E ratios in various cities crashing through the floor, and the deep logic behind power-for-money deals.

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Observe things as they are and reject fragmented understanding. A couple of days ago, I saw an article on Huxiu by a blogger who writes specifically about nightclubs, recording an experience told firsthand by a girl working at a commercial KTV in Zhejiang. This experience, frankly speaking, is quite interesting. It made me feel that, oh my, Chinese men seem to have a very, very strong characteristic, which is that they particularly love to drag decent women into the water and pull these fallen women ashore. The experience goes like this: a customer asked the girl why she was doing this job, and her answer was delivered in a completely flat and straightforward manner, which is why I consider it highly credible. The girl said she wanted to save up a sum of money, with part of it used to pay rent and another part kept for things she wanted to do in the future. Upon hearing this, the customer transferred a large sum of money to her on the spot. Afterward, he neither made any demands nor came looking for her again. What did the blogger want to say by writing this story? Well, it's that the money was already in this girl's hands, but the girl would still most likely go back to work. How did another girl in the same article put it in her own words? She said that people at this establishment all had to pay 100 RMB upfront to buy a wristband before they could start their shift; if they didn't buy it, they couldn't work. Why do I pay attention to the industry trends of commercial KTVs? Because business in the People's Republic of China is basically negotiated inside commercial KTVs. From the operational logic of China's commercial KTVs today, you can see the real Chinese economy, and you can even figure out which industry the CCP is about to start throwing money at. Let's start with this 100 RMB wristband. What do commercial KTVs sell? Primarily accompanying services, right? Girls in private rooms accompany guests in singing and drinking, and the tips given by customers are currently not cut by the establishment at all—not even a single penny. Why don't they take a cut? Still as an expedient measure. Because there are Regulations on the Administration of Entertainment Venues, which state very clearly: entertainment venues are not allowed to provide accompanying services for profit. If caught, business will be suspended for rectification for 3 to 6 months; in severe cases, the license will be revoked directly. Even if the establishment took a single RMB from the hostesses' tips for the girls, that would serve as very, very solid evidence.

Nowadays, these clubs aren't that stupid anymore. So how do the clubs handle it? Let me break it down step by step. Nowadays, when these girls come in to work every day, they first pay 100 RMB out of their own pockets to buy this wristband—well, that's the admission ticket to get in. After buying the wristband, on the books, this girl is no longer an employee; she's a customer who bought a ticket to enter. Moreover, the recruitment, training, and scheduling are all outsourced. To whom? Mainly to the team leader, the mama-san. Now, this mama-san is no longer called a mama-san, but a client manager. In other words, the whole system now is that the mama-san leads the team, then enters through outsourcing, and the customers' tips are paid directly to the girls. It doesn't go through the club's cash register. Going through this process, the only things left on the club's books are the private room fees, liquor bills, and wristband fees. So legally speaking, what is the club? Just a landlord renting out space to sell alcohol. Where does the risk go then? Well, it gets passed down layer by layer along this chain onto the girl. If no one requests her, this 100 RMB is simply wasted, and according to the girl's own account, the team leader's rules are fucking endless.

Media outlets have sent out a penalty list from a top club in Hangzhou, with fines for things like lowering prices without authorization, failing to add customers on WeChat, and even worse, calling the police without permission. The customer's tips are paid directly to the girls, but if the police really put in the effort to investigate deeply, it still wouldn't work. It mainly depends on how much bribery the club gives to the local Public Security Bureau. These are all clearly priced: how much for the station chief, how much for the political commissar, how much for the deputy station chief—very much a fixed-price deal. Let me tell you, these cops are more familiar with local entertainment venues than anyone else, because they themselves are major consumers. Alright, supposedly, after paying this 100 RMB, how much can she make in a night? Take that top club in Hangzhou called Skyline for example. The girls wear three colors of wristbands: black, orange, and red, corresponding to 4,000 RMB, 3,500 RMB, and 3,000 RMB per shift respectively. What did the blogger at the beginning say? It's that this kind of girl can make 1,200 RMB an hour. What is this price pegged to? Well, this part is quite interesting. There is a set of formulas circulating in the underworld, which we've talked about before.

If this escort fee is compared to the local housing price per square meter, the housing price is roughly equivalent to 15 to 25 times the commercial karaoke escort fee. Well, this is a P/E valuation range, and that's how everyone can understand it. For the escort fees, I can only use the range circulating in the industry. Tier-1 cities are roughly 3,000 to 5,000 RMB, strong Tier-2 cities are 1,500 to 2,500 RMB, and Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities are 800 to 1,200 RMB. Let's take the median values. But Guangzhou is an exception; I specifically asked someone about it, and the average price of Guangzhou's escort fees is only around 2,000 RMB. For housing prices, we'll use the second-hand housing average price from the China Index Academy in September this year. This formula is divided into two parts: the housing price range in Tier-1 cities is 15 to 25 times the escort fee. 15 times is a P/E ratio during an economic recession, and 25 times is a valuation during normal economic conditions—everyone can just understand it as the price-to-earnings ratio of a stock. The more it's in a bubble period, the higher this P/E ratio is; conversely, when the economy is sluggish, it's a low P/E ratio. The P/E ratio for Tier-2 cities is generally in the range of 8 to 15 times. Let's calculate, first looking at Tier-1 cities. Beijing's second-hand housing average price is currently 60,564 RMB per square meter. Divided by 4,000, that's 15.1 times. Shenzhen is 62,889 divided by 4,000, which is 15.7 times. Guangzhou is 32,313 divided by 2,000, which is 16.2 times. Shanghai is the most sluggish at 55,322 divided by 4,000, which is 13.8 times—it has already dropped below the floor. Let's look at Tier-2 cities. Hangzhou's second-hand housing average price is 31,382 divided by 2,000, which is 15.7 times. Chengdu is 16,094 divided by 2,000, which is 8 times. Wuhan is 6.4 times, and Tangshan is around 7 times. Everyone sees this pattern, right? The more sluggish the economy, the lower the P/E ratio. What kind of market trend can we read from this table? It's that Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai in the Tier-1 category are all lingering on the recession floor of 15 times, and Shanghai has already broken through that floor. In the Tier-2 category, Chengdu has just landed on the 8-times floor, and Wuhan has also broken through it. Hangzhou is relatively special: its escort fee is at the Tier-2 price, but the multiple is as high as 15.7 times, having pushed out to the ceiling of the Tier-2 range, which shows that in recent years, money from e-commerce plus AI has been used to hype Hangzhou as if it were a Tier-1 city. So calculated this way, apart from Hangzhou, not a single city is at a valuation during a booming period; they are either lying flat on the floor or have already fallen below the floor.

Here, I need to clarify the methodology. Commercial KTVs are generally located in city centers where housing prices around the factories are higher than the city-wide average. I used the city-wide average to calculate the multiple, so the result will be on the lower side, not higher. However, the direction of the multiple is not affected by this methodology. This price-to-earnings ratio is still falling, so I calculated it backwards by one year based on the year-on-year decline published by the CCP's China Index Academy. If we calculate the 'escort fee' at constant prices, what is this estimate? The multiple in Beijing last year was 15.6 times, and this year it has dropped to only 15.1 times. Guangzhou dropped from 17.4 times to 16.2 times, and Chengdu dropped from 8.6 times to 8 times. You see, at a rate of dropping by 0.5 to 1.5 times per year, at this speed, the 15-times floor for first-tier cities will definitely not hold by 2027. Perhaps you might ask, why does dividing housing prices by this escort fee show the price-to-earnings ratio? We can understand it by breaking down the numerator and the denominator. The numerator is the housing price; what is inside the housing price? It contains loans, leverage, and one could say it represents everyone's expectations for the future. The denominator is the escort fee; what is the escort fee? It is the cash that the person in the private room took out of their pocket that night. During the bubble period, everyone dared to borrow money and add leverage, so housing prices rose faster than cash, and that is how the multiple was pushed up to 25 times. But once the economy slumped, no one dared to borrow money anymore; housing prices turned downward first, while the cash was still in the pockets of that same group of people, but the multiple had already been squeezed back to 15 times, and if it is squeezed any further, it will break through the floor. So why is the range for second-tier cities so much lower than for first-tier cities? It is actually the same principle as stocks. In the eyes of buyers, houses in first-tier cities are equivalent to market leaders. What do they have? They have liquidity premiums, and market leaders also have valuation premiums, but second-tier cities do not. Therefore, this multiple does not measure the escort fee of the girls; it measures the leverage ratio of a city.

Since the denominator is the cash in the private room, whose cash is it? Well, guests at commercial KTVs have a characteristic: they rarely pay out of their own pockets; they are mostly invited. Back in the day, I was the one responsible for paying this money. The person inviting wasn't buying songs, nor were they buying alcohol; they were buying what was in the hands of the person being invited, which is power. Therefore, to see who the guest sitting next to the girl is, you only need to look at these points. First, the most valuable approval quotas and orders of those years were held in their hands. From 2002 to 2011, the most valuable thing was the mining rights for coal mines; these mining rights were completely stuck in the hands of local officials. What was the characteristic of those ten years? It was that the private rooms were full of cases of foreign liquor and stacks of cash; that was the trend back then. Then, in May 2010, Beijing raided the 'Heaven on Earth' club, and immediately after, in 2012, coal prices started to turn downward, and that group of people dispersed. Next came real estate and land. National land sales revenue hit a peak of 8.4 trillion in 2020, and this industrial chain is very long. From land acquisition to development loans, to pre-sale permits, to construction payment settlements, there is at least one person who needs to be invited at every step. At that time, developers, general contractors, trusts, and urban investment companies basically filled all the private rooms. After 2015, another batch of money entered; this group was P2P, those damn lending platforms, and internet mutual funds, meaning the guests started to get younger. How did this money exit? In mid-2018, P2P platforms collapsed in large numbers, and then in August 2020, that fucking idiot Xi Jinping came up with the 'three red lines.' Following that, in July 2021—everyone might still remember this vividly—the education and training industry was wiped out by that fucking idiot Xi Jinping. Immediately after, in December 2021, the Hangzhou tax authorities fined the streamer Viya 1.341 billion, so this group also exited the stage. By 2023, the protagonists on the stage had changed to chips and AI, and the ones paying had changed to state-owned capital and government-guided funds. Whether this money entered the private rooms, you can't check the public accounts, but my judgment is that it definitely entered the private rooms, because private rooms never care which industry the money comes from; they only care who holds the approvals and quotas. If state-owned capital fund money reaches an enterprise, it must first be approved as a project, and at every level of the state-owned system, there is someone who can nod or shake their head. As long as this person exists, the private room has a reason to exist. If someone can nod, it means someone needs to be invited; this is China's power culture. Money follows power, and consumption follows money. The money in the chip sector is being distributed by power in the same way; that bullshit 'Big Fund' for chips was basically all arrested, so there is no need to provide any harder evidence, right? Therefore, the denominator of the price-to-earnings ratio is not that no one is supporting it, but that it is constantly being supported by different people, but it is clear that the price-to-earnings ratio cannot be raised to the scale of the years when real estate was booming.

The practice of using private rooms to conduct business and establish monopolistic circles is nothing new. I tell you, this is a natural product of the combination of a hierarchical society and franchised power. Let me give you a classic example from institutional history: in the 45th year of the Wanli reign of the Ming Dynasty, which is 1617, the Salt Inspector of Lianghuai, Yun Shizhen, launched a major reform and implemented a system called the "Gang Salt Law." At that time, the private economy was on the verge of collapse. To secure funds in advance, the government turned the qualifications of salt merchants into a registry—the "Gang Registry." Only those listed in the registry were qualified to transport and sell salt. Moreover, this exclusive privilege could be passed down to descendants and even privately transferred. From then on, the salt permit was no longer just a simple delivery note; it became a hereditary business license, commonly known as a "salt nest." This was equivalent to the imperial court issuing monopoly licenses to a very small group of people, effectively blocking all small-scale private traders. Later, the Huizhou merchant monopoly group that dominated Yangzhou and possessed wealth rivaling the state was rooted entirely in this system, and this practice continued into the Qing Dynasty. A historian named Ho Ping-ti estimated that in the fifty years from 1750 to 1800, the Lianghuai salt merchants earned approximately 250 million taels of silver. The licenses were granted by the Qing court, and how much the price of salt could be increased, or whether taxes could be deferred, all depended on a single word from the salt administration officials. From the Qianlong to the Jiaqing reigns, the Lianghuai salt merchants donated over 30 million taels of silver to the court; this was the cost of maintaining their licenses. Why? Because this was a franchise, which inherently carries a certain undertone: the combination of power and capital. Since the lifeline was held in the hands of these officials, a business grew in Yangzhou called "raising thin horses." What does "raising thin horses" mean? It means buying young girls from poor families at a low price and teaching them music, chess, calligraphy, painting, and skills like bookkeeping and household management. Why raise them? To sell them to salt merchants and high-ranking officials. A talented scholar in the late Ming Dynasty named Zhang Dai, who wrote the famous "encyclopedia of wandering the world" called "Night Voyage Boat"—which is quite interesting, containing everything from folk remedies to fortune-telling and underworld slang—was quite the polymath. How did he describe Yangzhou city at the time? He said there were hundreds of people in Yangzhou city making a living from this business every day.

So how did this business disappear? In 1832, the Viceroy of Liangjiang, Tao Shu, changed the Gang Law to the "Ticket Salt Law" in Huaibei. This meant that anyone who paid taxes could transport salt. Suddenly, the hereditary licenses became worthless, and the salt merchants collapsed, followed by the dispersal of the "thin horses." You see, the whole process didn't involve anyone being replaced; it was just that the money used to pay for it was gone. Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty was the same play, just with different characters. At that time, the most valuable thing in the concessions was the business opportunity at the treaty ports, and this right was mainly held by compradors and money shops. But a problem arose: it spanned two legal systems, the Chinese territory and the concessions, and lawsuits couldn't be filed, so whether a contract was recognized depended entirely on the person. There was a place called Changsan Academy, which was the highest-end establishment in Shanghai at the time; a visit cost three silver dollars, which is where the name came from. Then, in 1894, a very interesting book was written called "The Flowers of Shanghai." This book was specifically about the rules inside, and the rules were written in great detail. What did it say?

It said that outsiders couldn't enter; you had to be brought in by a regular customer. Furthermore, if a banquet was held at the establishment and the host was a businessman, it was usually put on a tab and settled collectively during festivals. If anyone defaulted on the debt, the entire business circle would know, and no one would deal with them afterward. The logic here is also very clear: being brought in by a regular customer is a process of verifying identity, and being willing to host a banquet and clear the debt is a way of showing one's financial standing. Plus, a group of people doing something not entirely decent together is equivalent to holding each other's leverage, right? It's exactly the same as the private room logic today. In the past, I also had many annoying banquets to attend, and I had to invite people; there was no way around it, because many business licenses are not up to you. I remember one time very vividly: there was a girl pretending to be Taiwanese, and she charged twice as much as the other girls. That fucking idiot leader insisted on picking her. I still haven't figured out why there is such a high premium for being Taiwanese. Anyway, I didn't indulge her, because I was the one paying the bill in the end. I just said, "Come on, girl, write me a traditional Chinese character. You don't need to write anything else, just write the two characters for 'Taiwan'."

The result is that nothing could be written, and upon closer inspection, it turned out to be from Quanzhou, Fujian. Alright, let's get back to the topic. Later, I also saw a report about how some busybodies actually studied this matter. It involved two anthropologists: one spent over two years lurking in KTVs in Dalian, and the other spent over three years socializing with bosses in Chengdu. Who knows if these two guys were genuinely researching a problem or just indulging their personal interests. Regardless, the conclusions they reached were remarkably similar. Their conclusion was that private rooms are places where businessmen test whether officials are reliable, and at the same time, they are places where officials confirm whether businessmen are "one of us." Look at that, after connecting to the hotline, the matter itself transformed into what? It turned into collateral. Therefore, the attribute of business KTVs is power; it is the intersection of franchised operations, leverage, and loyalty pledges (toumingzhuang). Let's return to the girl mentioned at the beginning. Why is it that once a girl enters this industry, it becomes very difficult for her to leave? As mentioned earlier, clients transfer money to this girl. According to the article, such girls will mostly still go back to work. Why? The explanation given by this blogger is, in my opinion, highly credible.

These young women, whether in terms of appearance or speech, are qualified to be very good live streamers. However, emphasizing the live streaming industry nowadays, it is also quite competitive and involuted (neijuan). Having just these traits is not enough; you also have to know how to write scripts, and your income is uncertain. You have to stream for at least eight hours a day, whereas inside the venue, you could make 1,200 yuan in just one hour. Let's do another calculation: spending this kind of money only goes up, never down. Media reports say that girls at Skyline making over 10,000 yuan a day are a common occurrence. What is the daily consumption pattern of people who have earned this kind of money? Their consumption mainly consists of rent for luxury apartments, medical aesthetics, and luxury brand handbags. Furthermore, there is a huge misunderstanding: these girls completely distort their understanding of this money. She thinks that making this money relies on her own ability. Your actual ability only earns you the denominator mentioned earlier, which can be understood as a share of the cash in the pockets of the people in the private room given to you. Once you leave the power-filled private room, how much is the exact same companionship worth? Take pool hall assistants for example, the rate compiled by self-media ranges from 89 yuan to 119 yuan per hour.

So, ordinary Chinese people having the flaw of selling out? It is also an economic problem. Look, both are forms of companionship, but with the addition of a power element, their market value instantly expands 12 times on the spot. You tell me how many resources these CCP officials must hold in their hands? To put it further, going from frugality to luxury is easy, but going from luxury to frugality is hard, right? Going from 3,000 to 4,000 yuan an event down to 100 yuan an hour, this is no longer a pay cut; it's a difference of an entire order of magnitude. Therefore, it's not that the girls at the venue don't want to walk out, but that they simply cannot walk out, because no place can afford to pay that price, and their consumption concepts have already been pushed all the way up to that level. This is the curse that makes it relatively difficult to escape this industry. Let's continue talking about the economy.

Look at how the price-to-earnings ratios of these cities have dropped to the floor; ultimately, it boils down to one thing: the people paying the bill have no money. Let's continue looking at the data: the average price of second-hand residential housing across 100 cities fell by 7% in a single year, and 97 out of 100 cities are also falling month-on-month. What other consumption is related to power? There is also alcohol. In 2021, the operating revenues of listed baijiu companies directly plummeted by a combined 18.1% compared to the previous year. The original-box wholesale price of Feitian Moutai dropped from over 2,900 yuan in October 2021 to just around 1,700 yuan by September this year. If enterprises stop investing, there are no new projects to run. With no new projects to run, entertainment expenses are the very first thing to be cut. Nationwide, KTV enterprises numbered over 120,000 in 2015, and by May of last year, only 39,400 were still surviving. Low-to-mid-end venues are starving to death one by one like this. But top-tier venues are not starving to death; places like Skyline in Hangzhou had a total investment of over 200 million yuan, and even though they had been open for less than a year, people still dared to pump money into them. Now, what is their problem? Relying on high-end clients, they have no problem surviving.

But what about the middle-tier customers who came on expense accounts? They are gone. Just as I said before, the top-tier crowd who are there to scam subsidies don't have to spend their own money, so they are still around. The result is that everyone is crowded into a few top-tier establishments. When those top-tier places run into trouble, how does it usually happen? The main factor, as I see it, is that the middle-tier customers are gone. The account managers at these places are under pressure, so they resort to some rather messy tactics, like using short-video platforms or Xiaohongshu (RedNote) to drive traffic, showing off private rooms and bills. The old rule was that regular customers brought in other regulars, and everyone who walked through the door had to know each other's background—all to ensure that no one would report them. But those brought in publicly are strangers. Last March, something like this happened in Wenzhou: a designated driver got into a dispute over 2.6 yuan and reported the establishment directly, which resulted in several local underground clubs being shut down. To layer on top of that, at the end of July this year, that fucking Emperor You Xi (Xi Jinping) launched another one of those 'anti-organized crime' campaigns, which are as regular as a period. Every few years they drag it out, even more punctual than a period. Before every term renewal, they must 'sweep away black forces.' This fucking idiot now has the police in Zhejiang conducting two rounds of concentrated raids, taking down 234 so-called 'black-affiliated' gangs and arresting 2,901 people.

This round of investigations into underground clubs in Zhejiang isn't just checking the sites; they are also tracing the flow of funds. Under normal circumstances, these places are the 'money bags' for the local police. When there is no pressure for performance, they collect protection money from the clubs; when there is pressure for performance, these clubs themselves become the KPI, plus they serve as emergency relief for local finances. Your mother, land sale revenue has dropped by nearly 30% in a year, and now it's barely recognizable. So, what is an establishment that invested 200 million yuan in the eyes of the local government? Isn't it just a sucker and a fat sheep? The CCP hasn't disclosed how much money they extorted. Recently, there was a report about a special drinking party that revealed what? It found that even when it comes to escort services, these fucking CCP state-owned enterprises are cutting costs wherever they can, and as a result, they fucking cut too much and caused trouble. On August 18th of this year, there was a disposal notice from a Hangzhou investigation. What did it say? It said that on the night of July 26th, a corporate executive and a public official from Binjiang District went to a KTV after dinner—hey, look, the customer identities are correct, right? Then these two fucking idiots forcibly molested a woman and pushed her down, causing a secondary minor injury.

As a result, both men were criminally detained and dismissed from their posts. Later, the media dug up their identities: the executive was Zhao Haifeng, General Manager of China Merchants Shekou's Zhejiang company, and the one who organized the party was the General Manager of C&D Real Estate's Hangzhou company. The victim was a female subordinate of the organizer. In other words, they couldn't even order girls from the club anymore; she was called over with a phone call. You can see it, right? Developers, partners, and district officials—this is exactly the combination I mentioned earlier, and they are also the ones who still had projects in that wave of land deals. Around the time of the notice, those top-tier commercial KTVs in Hangzhou were sealed one by one. It's circulating online that the first batch alone involved fifteen venues, affecting over fifty cities. After the clubs were sealed, where did the girls go? I saw two other girls—this is also hearsay—saying that one of them, before returning to her hometown in Jiangxi, told this blogger that she might be unemployed for a long time and planned to go back and get married. Many girls, after returning to their hometowns, when asked, only said what? That the clothing business in Zhejiang isn't doing well. And the media also noted what else? That there has been a sudden increase in people selling bags and watches at second-hand luxury consignment shops, and there are more young women filling in 'freelance' as their occupation at matchmaking agencies. Also, there are more people going to work as assistants at billiard halls, and some nosy netizens have observed what?

After the crackdown began, a large number of new accounts suddenly popped up on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, featuring groups of young women taking turns dancing in front of the camera. So, here is my conclusion: commercial karaoke (KTV) has never been just a place for singing. Just think about commercial KTV in Taiwan. When was that culture most popular? It was in the early 1990s. At that time, the Taiwan government was also highly corrupt. The more corrupt a government is, the more it needs places like this to thrive. There is no other reason; it is a place to exchange 'letters of intent' (pledges of loyalty) and also a place to get things done. As long as resources are still determined by officials and contracts remain unreliable, then whether you are a business person or an official, you have to find a private place to verify identities, gauge each other's financial standing, and exchange leverage. This logic has not changed for thousands of years. In Yangzhou, it relied on salt licenses; in Shanghai at the time, it relied on the ports; today, it is about subsidies. Private rooms always follow the money with the highest leverage. The price-to-earnings ratio of that market has now fallen to 15 times and is still dropping. What it describes is that the money saved from the previous cycle has almost been spent, and new money has not yet come in.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) only shut down these venues this time, but it didn't touch the rules of resource allocation by the authorities with even a single finger. This is also an organizational characteristic of this fucking organization, the CCP: it does not want to reach a consensus with you directly, but rather completes an alliance by having both sides exchange leverage and 'letters of intent.' The South China Morning Post previously published a signed article where the author said that when she was young, she was one of the female employees often called to business dinners. These CCP officials are determined to proceed whether conditions exist or not, and if they don't exist, they will create them. So don't think that girls are safe once they enter the system; there are plenty of trials and tribulations within the system. And in the past, venues used to hang signs saying 'No outside alcohol allowed'; I guess in the future, they will have to hang signs saying 'No outside female companions allowed.' I tell you all, as long as this society under the CCP remains hierarchical and resources are mostly monopolized by power, commercial KTV will be the most microscopic indicator for measuring the leverage ratio of an industry. Furthermore, I have a rule that isn't quite a rule, let's call it an empirical observation: the more commercial KTV serves as a primary hub for business discussions in a place, the more it indicates that there is no spirit of contract in that place, and at the same time, the more it is a place where power runs rampant. If you are investing, it is best to stay away from such places. Alright, that is all for today's broadcast. If you like the program, please subscribe. If you would like to support me, you can join the channel. The channel has deep-dive programs every season; welcome to join the gang of tough guys. See you in the next episode.