A Chinese Visiting Scholar's Impressions of Russia and Germany

Russia has a surplus trade balance due to its oil exports - so they can keep the value of the ruble up. But the numbers mentioned - 500,000 rmb for fighting in the war and a covid test for 1,000 rmb - must seem excessive to the average Chinese.

All the object-level descriptions of other countries are unlikely to provide you with fresh insight if you're already familiar with them, but you can still learn something from the meta-level implication that this kind of content resonates with a Chinese audience.

I don't actually know much about Russia or its masculine energy, but I can speak to the author's observation that "on weekdays, the streets of Berlin were nearly empty, with few people and few cars," which he interprets as a sign of economic depression. Presumably, in his mind the capital of a major economy should also be an economic center, highly dense, full of people and cars, just like Beijing.

But Berlin violates all these assumptions and would look basically the same during a boom. It's a political center, but economically speaking just an average German city; the population is below the WWII peak, so density is low; public transport is popular and car ownership the lowest in Germany. Berlin definitely isn't Beijing.

(On the meta-meta level, this is also what it looks like when an article about China reaches a large audience on the English-speaking internet. All the actually accurate analysis just isn't entertaining enough to get widely read.)