I don't understand the rules or the language here, and I'm constantly banned on plebbit for saying mean things to all the groups I join, so I can never discuss Chinese stuff because I never reach the right amount of karma before a new ban. Anyway.

I noticed something new. I live in Hong Kong, so I'm a free gweilo for now and I can google and speak my mind as long as it's patriotic. I can even quote the national anthem. But I work in a large bank like everyone in Hong Kong, and I have many Shanghai colleagues, that I stopped trolling long ago. The last discussion before this week was a year ago on the corporate chat app that is miraculously joining gweilos and Chinese, when I said "I wish we could be more friendly, HK and the mainland, look at my shithole in Europe, we have this island that doesn't like us, we always fight but we have ways and policies to tolerate each other" and was immediately shut down "we should not speak about politics"-like. Like you know, we can scam clients out of millions of dollars in both direction, but saying China could do with HK like we do with Corsica to finally earn a friend is "dangerous". Fine.

But this changed this week. See, they started being locked down in Shanghai. People we know are sleeping on the trading floor, like the factory workers their parents were. Now after a few weeks, tongues are more flexible. There is less to lose from your home jail. The same colleague usually so scared of having an intelligent opinion, dared tell me he didn't like the Vice Premier, that he thought it was the outsiders, people from "other parts of China" that were forcing them to submit, that after having to cancel 3 meetings this week due to repeated testing, now at 15 tests since the lockdown, he thought they were all selfish and corrupt at the top.

It's not a big deal, I didn't dare ask if he thought Xi should be re-elected as god-emperor, and when I asked him if the big whites were like capos in a concentration camps, he told me they were nice people instead. So it's only a little wind, but it made me smile to see them dare, like a little fawn trying to walk for the first time !

Do you see something changing on the right side of the great guo ?