China’s malaise is only partly economic. The deep context behind several of the impediments to growth is a strange hybrid of psychological and political factors — a sort of psycho-political funk.
Sly, Soviet-style jokes are enjoying a subtle revival on Chinese social media platforms. Their art resides in being too obscure for censors to understand yet clear enough for cynics to chuckle at their mockery.
Some are so esoteric that their satire is confirmed only by the censors’ decision to delete them — echoing the cat-and-mouse dynamic that distinguished dissident humour in the former Soviet Union. One joke last week monitored by the China Digital Times, a US-based site that covers Chinese affairs, belonged to this genre.
