Sam Szuchan
@szuchans • 3,990 subscribers
Power, institutions, and the systems shaping the world.
Videos
In China, every public-school class runs a mandatory WeChat group, and the teacher uses it to push the school's work onto parents. Parents grade and sign the daily homework, and one missed punctuation mark gets the kid called out in the group. One kindergarten made parents watch a variety show and write a 10,000-character reflection; a mother stayed up till 4 a.m. doing it. After every notice, parents reply with what People's Daily called the three-piece set: received, you've worked hard, thank you. 老师辛苦了—Teacher, you've worked so hard. Then a father in Jiangsu refused. He'd just finished grading his kid's homework, the job a teacher is paid to do. Instead of typing the line, he filmed himself, asked who was actually tired here, and quit the group on camera. The clip topped Weibo's hot-search in hours and drew over 560 million reads in two days. Zhang Jiewei, a CPPCC member in Lishui, explained how this system came to be. The bureau orders less homework, but schools are still judged on how many kids test into good schools. So the work gets handed down until it stops at the parents, because the only thing below them is the kid. After the video took off, and millions of parents started sharing their own stories, the provincial governments moved fast. Liaoning ordered teachers to mark homework themselves, and a dozen other provinces followed suit. Authorities even went after the flattery, banning the bootlicking reply outright. The father was the first to say, on camera, that the “thank-you” was a lie. The economist Timur Kuran calls this preference falsification: countless parents had each typed 老师辛苦了 alone, sure they were alone in hating it, and, after the video, looked up to find everyone secretly agreed.
Sam Szuchan203,170 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
In 2011, a Chinese military singer's 15-year-old son beat a couple for slowing their car in front of him, then screamed "who dares call the police" at the crowd of over 100 people watching. For 15 years, that had been an accurate description of how his world worked. His father Li Shuangjiang was a People's Liberation Army tenor whose patriotic anthems made him a household voice for half a century. He was 57 when his son was born in 1996. He once said on television: "before I even hit him, my own tears would fall first." So the boy tested the limits. He drove a modified BMW for 9 months and collected 32 traffic violations, and not one produced a consequence. In the third grade he pushed a younger student down a flight of stairs. "Quietly resolved and dropped." At an American boarding school he swapped a classmate's protein powder for laundry detergent. Every test returned the same result. The last name was a shield. Then in February 2013, he was arrested for what he and four other men did to a woman in a hotel room. The court would later call him "the initiator and the main perpetrator." The family reached for the shield again. To get him off, they paid 12 criminal-law experts to publicly declare the case against him flawed. The court threw the opinion out as "the personal views of private citizens," with no legal weight. The playbook was failing because something had shifted above them. Days earlier, Bo Xilai, who until the year before had been one of the most powerful men in China and a sitting member of the ruling Politburo, was sentenced to life for corruption. The state was running what the party press called "the year of hunting tigers," built to prove that no name sat above the law. If they were jailing a Politburo member, they could not let a celebrity's son walk. He got 10 years. The family spent a fortune and a reputation defending protection they were certain they owned. They never owned it. The state had loaned it to them, quietly, for as long as it was convenient. When it needed a famous face to prove the law applied to everyone, it took the protection back. The son was the payment.
Sam Szuchan119,431 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
A billionaire was quizzed on TV about his own water bottle. On a Chinese TV show, a host held up a bottle of Wahaha water and asked the founder three questions: how many threads on the neck, how many ridges down the body, how many teeth around the cap. Zong Qinghou answered without stopping to think. Four threads, eight ridges, 18 teeth. The host checked on the spot. Every number was right. That performance fit the image perfectly. Chinese state media loved to call Zong 布鞋首富, the cloth-shoe billionaire. He wore shoes that cost about 30 yuan, roughly $4. He flew economy. He rode second class on the high-speed train. His office was under 50 square meters and didn't change for 30 years. By his own accounting, his personal spending ran under 50,000 yuan a year, about $7,000. He smoked 18-yuan cigarettes, about $2.50, until he quit. One wife, one daughter, one pair of cloth shoes. Three times China's richest person, and he made himself look like the most modest man in the room. Then Zong died in February 2024, and 10 months later, three people holding American passports, Jacky, Jessie, and Jerry, walked into the High Court in Hong Kong and said the accounting had been incomplete, meaning the public story of his life had left a few things out. See, there was a second family. Those three people were his other three children born between 1989 and 2017. An offshore trust at HSBC funded with $1.8 billion. A web of more than 100 companies. A former Hilton-family property in Los Angeles with 8 bedrooms and 16 bathrooms. None of it had appeared in the cloth-shoe story. No matter how humble or not he really was, the cheap shoes and the cheap cigarettes acted as a distraction. While the country was busy admiring how little he spent on himself, Zong was quietly moving $1.8 billion offshore for kids nobody knew existed. The "modest-guy" act wasn't a lie exactly. It was the reason nobody looked at anything else. So maybe here's the lesson. When a billionaire works this hard to look humble, that might be the trick. The 30-yuan shoes are the thing you're supposed to see. The $1.8 billion offshore might be the thing you're not.
Sam Szuchan78,163 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
In 1946, Fiji's Indians became the country's largest community, 120,414 against 118,070 indigenous Fijians. The colonial government responded by trying to shrink them. After that census, the administration in Suva pushed for a family planning campaign aimed specifically at the Indo-Fijian community, while London argued farm development would absorb the pressure. Suva won. Clinics opened in 1957, the International Planned Parenthood Federation designed the campaign, and the national program launched in 1962, one of the earliest in the developing world. It took off in 1964 with the Lippes Loop, a small plastic IUD. Uptake split along exactly the line the administration had hoped for, and kept going. By 1974, 53% of Indian women at risk of pregnancy used a modern method, against 28% of indigenous Fijian women. Indian fertility fell from 5.5 children in 1966 to 2.8 by 1986. That census came the year before the coup: Indian women averaging 2.8 children, indigenous Fijian women 4.2, a gap that had been widening for 20 years. One of the doctors who measured all this was Timoci Bavadra, an indigenous Fijian, not an Indian. In 1980 he co-wrote the main study of Fiji's family planning program, showing how far Indian births had already fallen. In April 1987, Bavadra became Prime Minister, elected by a coalition Indians voted for almost as a bloc. On 14 May, the army removed him, claiming it was blocking Indian control of the country. Bavadra's own published numbers showed the Indian majority had already stopped growing and was on its way out. Today nobody can give you a firm count. The 2017 census failed to produce reliable ethnicity data, so the last real one is 2007: 313,798 Indo-Fijians, 37.5% of the country. What is current is births. In 2022 Fiji registered 2,105 Indo-Fijian babies against 14,988 iTaukei. In early childhood classrooms, 2,942 against 14,828.
Sam Szuchan47,063 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
In 2011, Korean kids built a class system out of winter coats. By 2024, that same system had turned Moncler into a school uniform. It started on a Korean message board. A diagram sorted kids by which North Face jacket they wore. At the bottom: the 250,000-won Nuptse 2, the absolute entry level. It labeled you a loser. At the top: the 790,000-won Himalayan Parka, a coat most working adults would flinch at buying for themselves. Wearing it made you general. The highest rank in the army. The cheapest coat wasn't a bad jacket. It was what you got when you lacked the taste and selectivity the code demanded. Not knowing the code was itself the thing that ranked you. At one Busan study room, a reporter counted 13 of 20 students wearing the same brand. Then the chart evolved. In November 2017, at the peak of the long-padding craze, one outdoor label rang up 5.6 billion won in a single day. When the pandemic gutted household budgets in 2020, teen purchases of luxury padding on one resale platform rose 67%, the steepest jump of any age group. That same year, a price-comparison site published a new chart. The top box no longer read general. It read "our family heirloom": Moncler and Nigel Cabourn, 1 to 5 million won. The North Face had slid to the middle, now called "mom-and-dad" clothes. By 2024, Moncler, close to 4 million won, was the coat Gangnam students wore over their uniforms, alongside Arc'teryx, the red parka Samsung's Lee Jae-yong was photographed in. Walking a Seoul commercial block that winter, nearly every coat carried a name, stitched large enough to catch from across four lanes. I bought this National Geographic parka on my trip to Seoul that year. It's still my favorite coat, warm and well-cut. Where it sat on the grid, I only learned later. It launched in 2016, but by 2024, when I bought it, it was already played out, and had slid to the bottom—even as every fifth person on the street was wearing one. The top coat keeps migrating upmarket, because once a coat is on every second body on the street, it stops sorting anyone by status.
Sam Szuchan36,585 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen
For years, Korean fathers lived alone so their kids could get fluent English overseas. Then the market for that credential collapsed underneath them. By 2006, over 40,000 Korean primary and secondary students were enrolled in schools in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. Their fathers were in Seoul, wiring 70% to 90% of their salaries across the Pacific. The bet was simple. Child gets fluent English, child gets a Western credential, family claims a career premium back in Korea. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this was the best return on parental investment available to a middle-class Korean family with enough money to support two households. The bet started breaking around 2008. English fluency stopped being scarce in Korea. Hagwons in Seoul started offering full immersion. One academy in Daechi-dong, Hiconsy, grew its revenue from 63.9 billion won in 2018 to 331.2 billion won in 2023. A fivefold expansion in five years, selling the same product the goose families had been buying overseas. Meanwhile, returnee children, fluent in English but calibrated to Toronto or Sydney, found themselves outside the chaebol hiring networks that prioritized Korean university graduates. What looked like a premium credential a decade earlier looked like a gap in the resume. The credential these fathers spent a decade alone to buy became available locally for a fraction of the cost. And the fathers who'd already made the sacrifice couldn't undo a single year of it.
Sam Szuchan86,327 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
In South Korea, your employer badge has a black market price, and it's set by the dating market. In July 2023, a man in his 30s paid 50,000 won, about $37, for a fake Korean National Police login on Blind, the workplace app. His reason: he wanted women on Blind to see "Korean National Police" next to his messages. He told police the profession could "give the other person trust." That police login sold for 50,000 won, roughly $37. But a physician account was changing hands at 3 million won, about $2,240, roughly the price of a used compact car, according to a securities-firm employee who posted about it on Blind. The prices tracked almost exactly with the badge's social weight. This pricing isn't random. Korea's marriage matchmaking firms grade members from S down to C. Doctors, judges, and prosecutors sit at the top. Employees of Samsung and Naver land below the A tier. To clear A- as a conglomerate salaryman with no prestige profession, you'd need something like 10 billion won, about $7.5 million, in personal assets, and it has to come from your parents; self-made money at that tier doesn't count. People at small firms, freelancers, and part-time workers receive no grade at all. A matchmaking representative described this hierarchy as "something users have tacitly agreed to and actually want." The developer who forged 100 of these logins across Samsung, SK, and LG affiliates, plus the National Police Agency and the Ministry of Education, cleared close to 5 million won, around $3,730, in about six weeks before the Cyber Terror Response Unit arrested him. He was arrested. But the system that made his product valuable, the one that taught people to read a stranger by the logo attached to them, that's still running at full price.
Sam Szuchan26,196 Aufrufe • vor 18 Tagen
In 2000, a man walked into a Japanese bathhouse with a Japanese driver's license, a Japanese name written in kanji, and Japanese citizenship. He was turned away. The manager acknowledged the license. Then he explained, on the record, that this man's foreign appearance could drive Japanese customers to take their business elsewhere. His name was Arudou Debito. He sued. The Sapporo District Court ruled the bathhouse had committed what the judge called irrational discrimination that exceeds the socially permissible limit. One million yen per plaintiff. But look at what that phrase actually does. It creates a category called rational discrimination. And the court never defined where the line sits. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. They denied review. The city of Otaru was dismissed entirely because the court said it couldn't compel a municipality to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance. Japan has no law against discrimination. It signed the UN convention against it in 1995, and has told the UN Human Rights Committee it has no intention of passing one. A system built on statutes can be dismantled statute by statute. A system built on the absence of statutes has nothing to overturn. And that's the architecture Arudou walked into.
Sam Szuchan35,008 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
In Japan, some divorce lawyers explicitly advise their clients to take the children and leave before divorce talks even begin. The practice has a Japanese name: tsuresari, literally "taking away." And it works because of how Japanese family courts decide custody. The courts apply the continuity principle. It instructs judges to weigh, above almost every other factor, who has been physically caring for the child at the moment the dispute reaches court. Not who should have the child. Who has the child. Whoever answers that question first wins. The Asano Sogo Law Office's published guide for clients considering separation reads like an instruction manual. It advises: once you've moved out with the children, contact your spouse and confirm the children's safety. If the remaining spouse calls it abduction, the firm recommends having a lawyer pre-emptively contact the spouse, citing domestic violence if applicable. And here's the asymmetry. If the wife moves out with the children, she's presumed to be fleeing. Her lawyer frames the departure as protection. If the husband attempts to retrieve them through any means other than mediation, he's presumed to be the abductor. Police will warn him off and may arrest him if he persists. The Verybest Law Firm's guidance notes that prosecutors in such cases almost never indict the parent who leaves. One lawyer named Kensuke Onuki told reporters that in over 90 percent of cases where Japanese women return to Japan with children, the man is at fault. In the same interview, he added that domestic violence is difficult to prove. Those two statements have a logical relationship. If abuse is difficult to prove but is the assumed explanation, then the act of taking the children becomes self-justifying, retroactively.
Sam Szuchan37,651 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
On November 30, 2025, 2.83 million Chinese adults sat down in 250 cities to take the national civil service exam. They were competing for 38,100 jobs. The ratio: 98 qualified applicants for every single available post. That was up from 86 to 1 the previous year. And 70 to 1 the year before that. The trend only goes in one direction. One specific position, an entry-level officer at a repatriation center in Ruili, a small city on the Burmese border that most Chinese people could not find on a map, drew 6,470 applicants. For one job. The people sitting that exam are not victims of a sluggish economy. They are the deliberate product of one of the most successful state-led education expansions in modern history. China's higher-education enrollment rose from under four percent of the relevant age cohort in 1988 to over sixty percent in 2023. And the system cannot fix itself from either direction. Expanding college admissions further produces more frustrated graduates. Contracting them produces a different kind of frustrated young person who can point to friends who got in. The 2026 civil service draft was smaller than 2025 by 1,600 positions. The applicant pool grew by roughly 300,000. Beijing can pump out engineers. It cannot manufacture elite slots fast enough to absorb its own pipeline. And 6,470 people applying for a single clerkship on the Burmese border is not a number that shows up in any deck about China's future. But it should.
Sam Szuchan27,610 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
A fourth-grader in Suwon, south of Seoul, wanted to run for class president. His classmates talked him out of it. Their argument wasn't about popularity or grades. It was about logistics. He lived in a Humansia apartment, a public housing brand. And if a Humansia kid held the title, children from the other classes would have a word for the whole room. So he took his name off the ballot. At another school, a different boy just answered a question. A classmate asked where he lived. He said Humansia. And the other kids stopped letting him into their games. His mother repeated the word they gave him: 휴거. Hyu-geo. It's a contraction of Humansia and geoji, the Korean word for beggar. A child in the wrong building is a Humansia beggar. And the vocabulary kept growing. 엘사: a person who lives in LH, the state land and housing corporation. 엘거: LH plus beggar. 빌거: a child who lives in a villa, the low-rise housing that sits a rung under an apartment tower. When the government opened a program for young families called Newlywed Hope Town, the playground produced 신거, newlywed-hope-town beggar, before most of the buildings were even finished. These children read buildings the way adults read paychecks. A mother of a third-grader described her son coming back from a birthday party and naming the brand of the apartment it was held in. He had started asking her how many pyeong their home was, and what it was worth. She said she felt sorry for him in advance. Because every term these children use was waiting for them when they arrived. The classification was assembled by adults, for adult reasons, and handed down whole. What the children add is the missing filter. An adult who holds the same belief has learned which version of it can be said in front of the neighbors. A fourth-grader hasn't learned that yet. So he says 휴거 out loud. And keeps the other boy out of the game.
Sam Szuchan21,053 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
In 1936, Andrew Mellon wrote to Franklin Roosevelt offering to give the United States his entire art collection, Rembrandts, Van Dycks, paintings sold to him by Joseph Stalin himself, plus the money to build a museum to house them. He had one condition. From the letter: "I shall stipulate that the proposed building shall not bear my name, but shall be known as The National Art Gallery or by such other name as may appropriately identify it as a gallery of art of the national Government." He didn't want his name on it. He wanted other rich Americans to feel comfortable adding their collections without the awkwardness of donating into Mellon's monument. The strategy worked. Samuel Kress, Joseph Widener, Chester Dale, and Ailsa Mellon Bruce added their collections to the founder's. The National Gallery of Art in Washington today holds more than 150,000 works. There is no Andrew W. Mellon Gallery. There is a small bronze fountain a block north of the building that nobody visits. Mellon's gift terminated his control. He gave the paintings and the building to the government, full stop, and stipulated they be administered by an independent board. He could not get them back. The building was there and his name was off it. That's what made the gift work. Other donors saw it belonged to the country, not to one man. The modern foundation transfer works the opposite way. It preserves the donor's control through the board they appoint, the staff they hire, the strategic plan their family writes. Often in perpetuity. Through their grandchildren. Mellon refusing naming rights was not a small, polite gesture. It was a statement about what wealth is for. The wealth was for the gallery. The gallery was for the country. The country was the entity that had to perceive the gift as belonging to it, not to him. His name on it would have made the gift smaller.
Sam Szuchan14,050 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that the fate of the world "may depend on the effort of a single person." That same year, a game studio in California was building a character who delivers the identical pitch from a pod in post-nuclear Las Vegas. Neither was aware of the other. Mr. House from Fallout: New Vegas, a 2010 RPG set in the post-apocalyptic Mojave that's become one of the most debated pieces of political fiction in gaming. House is a tech CEO who predicted nuclear war, sealed himself in a pod, woke up 200 years later running Vegas through robots. Lead writer John Gonzalez built him from Howard Hughes, morphed him into a tech magnate. The game refuses to make him a villain. His Vegas works. He pitches you a roadmap: 20 years to reignite high-tech development, 50 to put people in orbit, 100 to reach the stars. Most competent option in the room. But one line tells you exactly how his mind works. He calls the democratic nation next door "a society of customers." Not citizens. Customers. That's a "paradigm" leaking. Kuhn used the word to describe frameworks so total the people inside them mistake them for reality. House ran a corporation before the bombs fell. Survived in a sealed pod, cut off from every feedback loop. His operating system never updated. Every relationship stays transactional; people are customers, democracy is a competitor with an inferior product. The vocabulary never breaks. Always business. Underneath is governance by a man who built a robot army so he'd never face an election. In 2025, Gonzalez said his sense of House changed watching "the rise of Silicon Valley would-be messiahs." The "trust me, I'll get us to space" pitch landed differently fifteen years later. He'd written a mirror in 2009 and the world walked into it. House isn't confused about what he is. He calls himself an autocrat. Inside his "paradigm," autocracy is just what competence looks like when nobody else is qualified. "I built this" becomes "I own this" becomes "I govern this" becomes "of course I govern this, who else would?"
Sam Szuchan14,817 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
A girl in Japan was banned from her school for having the wrong hair color. In April 2015, a fifteen-year-old enrolled at Kaifūkan, a prefectural high school in Habikino, Osaka. Her hair was naturally light brown, but the school had a rule against dyeing. For context, most Japanese have jet-black hair. Her mother flagged it before the first day, asking them to make allowance because the girl's hair was brown by birth. On the morning of her student ID photo, a teacher said she could not come to school with hair that color. The school decided that her natural hair was, indeed, black. So she dyed it black. Then she dyed it again, because the black was never quite black enough. At its peak, teachers were inspecting and correcting her hair once every four days. She was pulled from the regular classroom into a separate room, and told she would not join the school festival with everyone else. Finally the choice was put plainly: dye it black or leave. In September 2016, halfway through her second year, she stopped coming. She sued the prefecture for 2.2 million yen and won 330,000, none of it for the dyeing. That sum was awarded only because, after she left, the school removed her desk and struck her name from the register. For erasing a student, the prefecture owed her. For the dyeing that drove her out, it owed nothing. The district court, then the high court, held the rule fell within the school's discretion. Nobody with the power to rule otherwise found that unreasonable.
Sam Szuchan12,698 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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