[US Trending] $62,000 Hired a Hitman, All Over a Joke | 6,746 People Fight for One Job | Is China Repeating the Fall of the Late Ming? | Aito Crashed into a Pole and Caught Fire, “139 km/h” Questioned | The Japanese Don’t Eat? The Chinese Don’t Rest!
This episode covers several trending topics: A Bilibili vlogger discovered an elderly person using a national flag to wrap scrap metal and demanded they hand over the flag; the autumn recruitment season for 2027 college graduates is fiercely competitive, with one position in Yunnan seeing a 6,746-to-1 application ratio; state media reports on Japanese workers living extremely frugally have triggered mockery from Chinese netizens regarding their own excessive overtime, alongside the incident of Yishan Technology employees reciting slogans at morning meetings; multiple workers in Zhejiang, having failed to receive their unpaid wages, smashed the tiles they had just laid; a Wenjie M9 crashed into a pole and caught fire in Yulin, Shaanxi, sparking controversy over speed and battery safety, with the owner reporting vehicle speed loss and missing records, while the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology admitted that some automakers' testing and verification processes are insufficient; a mainland Little Pink hired a hitman for 450,000 yuan to stage a fake car accident to attack Taiwanese stand-up comedian Huang Yi-hao, leading to an indictment by Taiwanese prosecutors; an article in Foreign Affairs magazine compared China's current demographic decline, fiscal pressure, and political paralysis to the crisis at the end of the Ming Dynasty; finally, we reviewed the netizen mockery and audience comments surrounding the zero-COVID film 'The White-Clad Heroes'.
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US Trending Topics lets you hear voices from outside the Great Firewall. Hello viewers, welcome to today's US Trending Topics, I am Qi Xiaotian. In a normal society, when people see a poor person, their first reaction is pity, or even questioning why society and the government would allow someone to fall into such poverty. However, in the CCP society, the brainwashed Little Pinks' first reaction upon seeing a poor person is: Does this person love the country? On October 17, a Bilibili vlogger posted a video showing an elderly person collecting trash using a national flag to wrap the waste, and stepped forward to demand the elderly person hand over the flag. Netizens said: If banknotes cannot buy goods, they are just waste paper. If the government cannot guarantee people's livelihoods, it is a bandit. A bandit's flag is not worth as much as waste paper.
China will have 12.7 million college graduates in 2026, an increase of 480,000 from last year, hitting a new historical high. It is currently the autumn recruitment season, but these graduates are finding that finding a job is even more of a rat race than studying. Recently, 2027 college graduates participating in autumn recruitment have been complaining online about the fierce competition for positions this year. One graduate student said they spend every day doing endless assessments and written tests, and despite having internship experience at major companies, they still haven't received a single offer; everyone is very anxious. A netizen sighed: After more than a decade of hard study, you still have to compete with thousands of resumes for a single position. This netizen is absolutely right. On October 18, recruitment data from the Yunnan Transportation Technician College showed that the college planned to recruit 1 person for the "Admissions and Employment Management" position, but 9,310 people applied. According to the final registration data released by Yunnan Huatu on September 14, 9,194 people passed the review for this position, and 6,746 people completed the payment. Based on the number of paid applicants, the competition ratio reached 6,746:1. A netizen said dejectedly: I'm afraid this position was already rigged.
The economic situation of Chinese people is deteriorating by the day, and life for those at the bottom has become an involution (rat race) that is too miserable to witness. The Chinese government's solution is to mobilize people to pay into social insurance while telling everyone: "Don't worry, the Japanese have it worse than you." On October 18, Chinese state media collectively reported that a 23-year-old worker in Japan claimed to have "canceled meals" due to rising vegetable and meat prices, eating only once every two days. State media claimed this reflects Japan's economic weakness. A netizen inside the Great Firewall scoffed: "What Chinese people cancel is vacation and rest." Indeed, on October 18, a netizen revealed that a certain company's new work schedule is "big and small weeks," meaning: "seven working days on the big week, six working days on the small week, with only one day off every two weeks." Another woman recently claimed that at JD Logistics, she has to work 18 hours a day, six days a week with one day off, earning only 5,000 yuan a month. Working on the assembly line turning screws not only involves excessively long hours and extremely low wages, but also requires undergoing constant obedience training. On October 19, a netizen revealed: In Guangdong, Yishan Technology Group Co., Ltd. forced employees to hold a morning meeting on the factory playground at 7:00 AM to chant slogans wishing for the motherland's prosperity and strength. Netizens joked: Is this a branch of northern Myanmar?
Getting paid after finishing work is only natural. Yet wage arrears have actually become the norm in Chinese society. On October 19, in Zhejiang, several workers did not receive their due wages after finishing tiling work. After demanding unpaid wages yielded no results, they collectively decided to smash the tiles they had already laid. A netizen remarked: You can imagine how heartbroken they must be to smash the tiles they laid with their own hands. If channels for demanding unpaid wages were truly open and effective, who would vent their frustration by destroying the fruits of their own labor?
Not long after the brake pedal broke on a Huawei Maextro, a Huawei Aito turned into a fiery furnace once again. On October 17, in Yulin, Shaanxi, a flagship Aito 9-series vehicle lost control, crashed into a lamppost, and quickly burst into flames. Three days later, Aito Customer Service released an official statement saying: online rumors of battery deflagration are untrue; after a violent impact, short circuits in the internal wiring and fluid leaks led to the fire. At the time of the incident, the vehicle was in manual driving mode, and the vehicle speed was as high as 139 km/h, whereas the road speed limit was 50 km/h. Netizens, however, stated one after another that the vehicle was not traveling at 139 km/h at the moment of impact. One netizen even worked out the math. The officially reported start of the impact was at 23:25:11, and the actual impact occurred at 23:25:13, a difference of about 2 seconds, with an impact distance of approximately 25 meters. Based on an isosceles triangle, it is not difficult to calculate that the actual speed at that moment was 63.65 km/h. Another netizen uploaded the video to Twitter's AI, Grok. Grok also estimated the impact speed to be around 70 km/h.
Other netizens posted China's national automotive safety standards: vehicles must not catch fire within 30 minutes of a collision, yet the Aito vehicle in this traffic incident burned rapidly within about 2 seconds after the crash; by the 7th second, the fire had already spread across the entire car. A netizen visited the crash site and saw that the lamppost struck had merely had a layer of paint scraped off. A Twitter netizen joked: Huawei claims the speed was 139 km/h, yet it barely bumped a nose of dust off the utility pole. Huawei always treats the public like fucking idiots. As of now, the authorities have not released any evidence pointing to drunk driving. Some netizens have already begun to suspect that Huawei's brakes failed again. While some domestic car brake pedals can snap, others don't even need the pedal to break—the axle breaks directly. On October 18, a domestic electric car was in normal operation when its axle suddenly broke, nearly causing a car crash. Another domestic car owner had the gearshift lever snap clean off while driving. Netizens commented: They can't even get brake pedals and chassis right, yet they have the nerve to mock traditional fuel-powered cars.
On October 19, an owner of an Aito M9 said that while traveling with his daughter in late August, the vehicle lost power twice in a single day, one of those times coming to a stop in the highway travel lane. Afterwards, he asked the dealership for the backend driving logs and tried to mediate through 12315, but was unable to obtain the records. After retrieving the SD card, he discovered that the footage of both power-loss incidents was missing, although the video recordings before and after the power losses were intact. Netizens joked: When your knowledge does not match your wealth, your wealth will flow to Huawei. The news of the broken brake pedal on the Huawei Maextro has grown so big that even the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to step in and say a few words. On October 20, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology admitted that some automakers suffer from problems such as "following trends blindly to launch new products, with inadequate testing and validation," and that it will resolutely prevent irrational innovative designs and automotive products without sufficient R&D testing and verification from entering the market. Netizens complained: I wouldn't believe a single word they say, not even their punctuation marks!
The joke above was performed last May in Taipei by Taiwanese crosstalk actor Huang Yihao. As a result, a thin-skinned Little Pink from mainland China, nicknamed “K,” dissatisfied with Huang’s criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), offered 450,000 New Taiwan Dollars to arrange a fake car accident that would hospitalize him and prevent him from performing on September 20. According to the prosecutors, the suspects installed a GPS tracker on Huang’s scooter, and on September 11, they scouted near his residence, drove a vehicle to ram him, and recorded the incident. Afterward, they obtained a medical diagnosis under the guise of a traffic insurance claim and sent it back to K. However, because Huang only suffered a bruised right pelvis, K refused to pay the remaining balance of 200,000 NTD. On October 21, the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office indicted five individuals on charges including attempted aggravated assault. Crosstalk actor Huang Yihao stated afterward that despite being injured, he still completed his special performance on September 20 as planned. A Twitter netizen joked: “Refusing to pay the final balance because the crash wasn't hard enough—even when carrying out transnational repression, the Communists still default on wages.”
Next, let’s move on to the Foreign Media on China segment. China is entering its own twilight era. This time, the historical reference point is not the Soviet Union, but the Ming dynasty of over 400 years ago. The US magazine Foreign Affairs recently published a long article by China scholar Carl Minzner titled “China’s Long Twilight: Demographic Decline, Political Paralysis, and the Fate of a Great Power.” The article states: Today’s China is exhibiting political and social characteristics similar to those of the Ming dynasty. In its early years, the Ming dynasty explored the outside world, but subsequently turned toward isolationism. The rulers grew increasingly wary of foreign influence and emphasized the restoration of a so-called orthodox Chinese civilization. The ideological policies promoted by General Secretary Xi in recent years bear striking similarities to the Ming dynasty. For instance, the Ming suppressed certain foreign religious beliefs; today, Beijing is pushing for the “Sinicization” of Christianity and Islam. The Ming emphasized Confucian ethics and traditional family order; General Secretary Xi continually stresses that women should play the role of virtuous wives and good mothers and build family civilization. Not only do these policies fail to solve the demographic crisis, but they may also make the problems even worse.
From 2013 to 2024, the number of newly registered marriages in China dropped by about 55%. A growing number of women wish to receive an education, develop their careers, and have the right to independently decide on marriage and childbirth. However, the top leadership of the CCP is composed entirely of men; they still attempt to encourage young people to marry and have children through birth subsidies, propaganda promoting multi-child families, and tightening divorce regulations. Such policies ignore the real plight of young people and further exacerbate tensions between men and women. China’s population peaked at around 1.4 billion in 2021, and has since decreased by 3 million to 4 million people each year—equivalent to losing the population of a city like Los Angeles annually. According to the demographic trends cited by the author, by the 2040s China’s population could shrink by about 10 million people per year.
Another potential solution to the continuous decline in fertility rates is to bring in foreign immigrants. South Korea used to be a relatively closed society, but to cope with labor shortages, it has begun accepting more foreign workers. Today, foreign residents account for about 5% of South Korea's population. By contrast, foreign residents account for only about 0.1% of China's population. The CCP's constant propaganda about foreign cultural infiltration, spy threats, and nationalism may make it even harder for China to attract foreign workers in the future. As economic growth slows down and the population continues to age, the problems facing China may gradually evolve into more severe social discontent. But Beijing’s response is likely not institutional reform, but rather intensified surveillance and stability maintenance (weiwen). The article predicts that in the coming decades, the CCP may increasingly tend to treat demographic, economic, and social problems as national security issues; maintaining superficial social stability through grid management, comprehensive surveillance, and political suppression. However, suppression is not equivalent to solving problems.
이미 The Ming dynasty has already provided us with a historical lesson. By the late 16th century, the Ming dynasty was already facing severe financial problems. Long wars and government spending had exhausted the state treasury. The reformer Zhang Juzheng at the time attempted to expand the tax base and make landlords and powerful elites bear a greater financial burden. However, this met with fierce opposition from these classes. After Zhang Juzheng’s death in 1582, the reforms he promoted were overturned, and he himself was even posthumously targeted. As a result, the national financial burden ultimately fell upon ordinary farmers. Today’s China is seeing a similar scenario. First, China’s fiscal pressures have already begun to manifest. Some local governments are experiencing deficits and even struggling to pay teachers’ and civil servants’ salaries and benefits on time. Meanwhile, individual contributions for rural residents and migrant workers to join medical insurance have increased by an average of about 20% annually over the past 20 years. Unable to afford the costs, about 83 million people have dropped out of the relevant medical insurance in recent years. Recently, the CCP has also started using big data to hunt people down to pay social security. These situations are very similar to the financial crisis in the late Ming dynasty, where the state continuously shifted its burdens onto the vulnerable groups of society.
The political system in the late Ming Dynasty also gradually fell into paralysis. Due to the issue of the successor, the Wanli Emperor was in prolonged confrontation with court officials. In the later period of his reign, a large number of memorials to the throne were left unread by the court, important official positions remained vacant for a long time, and the bureaucratic group fell into severe factional struggles. Although the entire country still maintained a huge administrative system, the political stalemate at the highest level had seriously weakened the government's governance capacity. After Xi Jinping came to power, political power was recentralized toward individuals, and officials became increasingly afraid to correct the mistakes of the top leader. During the pandemic, Shanghai officials found that after their initial attempts to adopt relatively precise epidemic prevention measures were inconsistent with the zero-COVID policy insisted on by Xi Jinping, they ultimately chose to obey the central government. The result was that Shanghai experienced a severe lockdown lasting up to two months, and many residents were even unable to steadily obtain food and medicine. However, Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Li Qiang did not lose his political future because of this; instead, he entered the Politburo Standing Committee in 2022 and became Premier of the State Council in 2023. This political environment sent a signal to officials: executing the will of the top leader is more important than solving practical problems.
This political paralysis is also reflected in China's population and social security policies. China has long practiced a relatively low retirement age. Researchers had long predicted that the main pension fund, covering about 500 million urban workers and retirees, could be depleted by the mid-2030s. Discussions on raising the retirement age lasted for more than a decade, until it was officially launched in 2024, and it will not be fully implemented until 2040. With Xi Jinping holding power for a long time, the bureaucratic system is increasingly lacking the ability to make independent decisions, and the successor issue has not been resolved for a long time. By the 2030s or 2040s, China may simultaneously face political stagnation, the decline of the bureaucratic system, and a succession crisis at the top leadership level.
What is even more noteworthy is that the Ming Dynasty was ultimately not brought down by any single problem alone. Rather, financial difficulties, political paralysis, social inequality, and continuous natural disasters compounded to finally detonate the crisis. In the 1620s, the Ming government cut expenditures, causing Li Zicheng, who originally worked as a postal station clerk, to lose his job. Later, he joined rebel forces and launched an uprising; by the 1630s, severe droughts and famines drove a large number of desperate peasants to defect to Li Zicheng. In 1644, the Ming Dynasty perished. The question is, in the future, if China cuts the pensions and benefits of personnel inside the system in order to cope with a financial crisis, will it provoke similar dissatisfaction? When the political system is chronically unable to resolve social conflicts, seemingly unrelated problems may compound at a certain moment to form a crisis.
Some American scholars are also worried that when the Chinese leadership realizes that national strength may be approaching its peak and that it will face more severe demographic and economic pressures in the future, it may choose to take military risks against Taiwan before the situation deteriorates further. It is hard to imagine that today's China might face a historical crisis similar to that of the late Ming Dynasty. But the decline of a major power often does not happen because an unsolvable problem suddenly appears one day. Rather, problems that could have been solved were repeatedly delayed by rulers; systems that could have been reformed could not be changed due to vested interests; social conflicts that could have been alleviated continued to accumulate under political repression. By the time these conflicts finally erupted, it was often already too late. More than 400 years ago, the Ming Dynasty once possessed vast territory, population, and wealth, yet it was ultimately dragged into the abyss by financial collapse, political paralysis, and social unrest. Today's China is certainly not the Ming Dynasty, and history will not simply repeat itself. But if a country can only continuously strengthen its rule while becoming increasingly unable to solve its own problems, then no matter how powerful the state machine is, it cannot prevent itself from heading toward its twilight.
Below, let us look at a few absurd videos. After the zero-COVID lockdowns were lifted, the CCP banned all traces and records of zero-COVID. Today, the CCP apparently decided that enough time has passed to turn a funeral into a joyful event, and thus allowed the documentary film about bail-clad medical workers to be released soon. In response, netizens created AI sketches mocking this film and the zero-COVID lockdowns. Netizens lamented: If this movie becomes a hit, then there is truly no saving this. The CCP has always changed history arbitrarily, but sometimes the fabrications are too absurd. The narrator below tells a story of Chairman Mao's so-called personal experience. Come and listen, is this story reliable? Netizens joked: Compared to General Kim, this falls far short. If General Kim encountered such a scene, not only would the bomb not explode, but the General would throw the bomb back in reverse, blowing up the enemy's airplanes and positions completely.
At the end of the program, we enter the netizen interaction segment. zoo commented on the CCP's mobilization for social insurance participation, saying: During the Great Leap Forward, they over-collected grain, seizing seeds, farmers' rations, and livestock feed. Isn't the current push for social insurance contributions the same path? It is not calculated based on income proportion, but by setting a minimum amount for collection. Back then, it was a famine despite overflowing granaries; this time, will the national treasury be overflowing while domestic demand is forced to zero? Jenni WONG commented on the trend of refusing to participate in social insurance, saying: This is another manifestation of the government's lack of credibility. 'It's good to have only one child, the government will provide for your old age'—wasn't that what you said? Now you are advocating that retirement depends on oneself? A government like this is not far from collapse. dlfang said: Under a regime that is a fraud syndicate, not being scammed is a crime. That is all for today's US trending topics. Thank you for watching. To our new viewers,
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