Iran Turns on Beijing: VP Calls Chinese Cars Trash, Air Defenses Garbage!

China military shock. Five-seven-three, ton rocket blown apart in 85 seconds as faulty parts, and a rushed launch machine come under fire. Iran turns on Beijing, VP calls Chinese cars trash, air defense is garbage. China's skyscrapers keep rising higher, yet 47.5 million people are homeless. Post, zero-zero-slash-full-of-resentment attack their elders, a fight that lets the CCP walk away. South China Sea, smells of gunpowder, China piles, radar islands, Philippines, vets on drones. China military shock. Five-seven-three, ton rocket blown apart in 85 seconds as faulty parts, and a rushed launch machine come under fire. On the night of August 10, at 8.2pm, China launched the Jiangxing-4B satellite from Wenchang, Hainan, aboard a Long March 7A rocket. Just 85 seconds into the flight, a bright flash lit up the night sky. The rocket broke apart, trailing smoke as debris fell. That same night, Xinhua reported a flight failure and said investigators were working to determine the cause. Jiangxing-4B was a high-orbit communications satellite operated by China Satcom, designed mainly for broadcasting. Signals for CCTV and regional channels reaching remote rural areas rely on this type of satellite under the official village-to-village access and every household access projects. The rocket had a liftoff weight of 573 tons and stood about 60 meters tall, roughly the height of a 20-story building. This was the Long March 7A's 18th flight. After its first launch failed in 2020, it completed 16 consecutive successful missions from 2000 and 2021. This time, the flight lasted just 85 seconds. Leaked close-up footage showed the upper section bending noticeably around the area between the second and third stages before the first explosion. The core stage and four boosters continued moving for several seconds, with engine flames still visible then a larger explosion followed. The first obvious major failure appeared in the upper part of the rocket, not in the engines. Nine days later, a source using the alias Liu Fei, described as having connections to the Chinese military-industrial system, said the preliminary assessment he heard was that several small components may have failed quality checks. He also claimed that departments involved in military projects receive tens of billions of yuan in annual funding, that extra money is often requested when budgets fall short, and that some projects require extra spending to pass acceptance reviews. There is no official accident report confirming the small parts explanation, but China itself has seen this before. In February 1996, a Long March 3B lost control two seconds after liftoff from Sichang and crashed into a nearby mountain 22 seconds later. The cause was a faulty shoulder joint in the inertial guidance system. The Long March 7A's main developer is the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. Its director, Wang Xiaojun, was removed from the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in January 2024. After a central inspection, the organization said it needed to analyze recent quality issues. During rectification, 36 people received party disciplinary punishments, 14 received administrative penalties, 8 faced organizational action, and 7 were transferred to judicial authorities. Looking higher up, the last two heads of the Central Military Commission, Science and Technology Commission, are both gone. Lieutenant General Liu Guozhi's biography was removed from the Chinese Academy of Sciences website in March. His successor, Navy Lieutenant General Zhao Xiaojie, disappeared from the Chinese Academy of Engineering membership list on August 18-8, days after the failure, when the list dropped from 978 to 977. J-20 chief designer Yang Wei's name also vanished in March. Authorities never stated that academic status had been revoked or explained why. China's launch pace has accelerated sharply. 67 launches in 2023, 68 in 2024, 92 in 2025, and a 2,026 target of more than 100. On August 19, SpaceX had already completed its 100th mission of the year. SpaceX has flown reusable first stages for a decade. China only began reaching that stage in 2026. China's Thousand Sails constellation had 218 satellites in orbit by early July. Starlink has surpassed 10,000. In 2026, the failures piled up. On January 17, a Long March-3B carrying Shijian-3-2 failed. Hours later, the Sirius-2 first flight also failed. On April 3, Tianlong-3's first orbital attempt failed. Then came August 10. With about two-thirds of the year gone, China had around 59 launches and already four failures, double the two public failures recorded across 92 launches in 2025. Tiny defects have brought down rockets before. A zero. Two-millimeter foreign object in 2022. An improperly processed screw hole in carbon fiber in 2023. In 2020, a bird-talon-shaped crack on a valve housing was caught only after fuel had already been loaded for a Beidou mission. The Long March-7. A launch cycle was cut from about 35 days to 23, then to 19. On June 23, specialized teams began operating in parallel. On July 29, officials announced the rocket had entered a normalized phase of high-density launches. Twelve days later, Jiangsheng-4B failed. If the investigation finds that several defective small components caused the breakup, the real question is whether quality control can keep up after production speed has been increased. Quality cannot simply be assigned by a quota. Twelve days after the failure, the only official public statement remains the one released on August 10. The specific cause is still under further analysis and investigation. Iran turns on Beijing. VP calls Chinese cars trash. Air defense is garbage. On August 16, in primetime on Iranian state television, Vice President Ismail Saghaei Esfahani went after the cars Tehran has been buying from China. Whenever Iran turns to imports, he said, it ends up with low-quality, thirsty Chinese vehicles, some worse than the homemade ones. Complete Japanese cars would have been cheaper. He called Iran's own auto industry a 60-year-old baby. The line was rough. In Beijing, the sting was that he was describing the lot. A Chery Tiggo 8 Pro Max that lists for about 150,000 yuan in China can run nearly 340,000 yuan, around $50,000 in Iran after freight, tariffs, the exchange rate, knockdown assembly, and sanctions risk. Owners eat the difference. Many Chinese cars in Iran are kits bolted together locally. Transmissions, electronics, and body parts fail. Replacements are late, expensive, or fake. Some cars were making strange noises or losing gearboxes before 30,000 kilometers. A salesman put it plainly, Iranians don't like Chinese cars. Wealthy Iranians would never buy Chinese cars. They hate Chinese cars. Saghaei Esfahani runs energy, not autos. He spoke because the relationship is shifting under the U.S.-Iran war. The Strait of Hormuz did not deliver. Oil never hit $200. Markets did not panic. Washington did not fold. Hardliners tied to the Revolutionary Guard have lived for decades on the threat of a blockade. After more than half a year, Brent only brushed about $120. Unwilling to admit the card is dead, they pointed at the Chinese Communist Party. The Times-Khorasan Daily, close to parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, asked whether China's sharp cut in Iranian crude was meant to blunt Tehran's weapon or just to stay out of the shooting. Beijing has its own problem. Iranian barrels are costly and risky. The Shadow Fleet keeps meeting the U.S. Navy. China's daily Middle East oil take fell to a nearly 10-year low. Shandong refineries cut runs. First half 2026 crude imports dropped about a third. The IEA said China pulled 41 million barrels from storage in June, the largest monthly draw on record. Food prices in Iran jumped 134 percent year over year in July. Headline inflation hit 84 percent. President Massoud Pazesh Kian called the economy and daily life the main battlefield. On August 24, Washington piled on sanctions that Axios, citing U.S. officials, said would last at least through the November midterms. One official noted Iran's system was built to shield the elite. Now even they miss paychecks. U.S. Central Command said the blockade had already cut most oil exports. As of that date, it had turned 71 commercial vessels, destroyed three that ignored orders, and boarded two. More than 40 aid ships were let through. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed talk of a pause. If Iran is foolish enough to overplay its hand or mess with the American military, we'll do what we need to do. The State Department's Rewards for Justice program put up to $10 million on five IRGC commanders. The Carr speech sits on a longer list. Months ago, Israeli and U.S. electronic warfare and stealth strikes tore up Iran's air defense net. China's JY-26 radar and HQ-9B batteries, sold as a stealth killer, stayed largely quiet while strikes reached sites, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's residence. The CCP military has not fought a major war since 1979. Weapons get polished in scripted drills. Iran mixed Chinese, Russian, and local gear, and watched the network fall apart. Early in the year, Tehran fired 101 missiles at the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group. U.S. defenses killed all of them. The carrier kept launching aircraft. Sources said about 50 were Chinese CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles sent through Pakistan. After that miss, Xi Jinping was said to have detained Academy of Engineering radar and missile specialists, including Wu Mengqing, and opened cases against Zhao Xianggang and Wei Yiying over fake data and wasted funds. Huawei and ZTE built Iran's telecom and censorship stack. Hikvision, Uniview, and others filled the streets with cameras to catch uncovered women and protesters. In 2026, those same networks were reported hacked, exposing officials' movements. What Tehran paid for as control started to look like a leak. Chinese brands hold about 19.7% of Iran's passenger market, only because Europe, America, Korea, and even Japan walked away after 2018. The choices left were Chinese kits, thirsty domestic cars, or decade-old used stock. Similar complaints show up in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Parts, rust, heat, warranties. Euro NCAP flagged BYD's highway assist and an MG3 seat that twisted in a crash. Hardliners still want Hormuz as a club. Negotiators need to show the club does not work. China, long the quiet supplier, is now in the middle. If the hardline breaks, Beijing may be among the first partners dumped, and the next targets will not stop at Sherry. China's skyscrapers keep rising higher, yet 47.5 million people are homeless. Finally, here. On streets, in parks, under bridges, and in underpasses across China, the number of people sleeping rough is growing. Even in first-tier cities like Shenzhen, large numbers of homeless people have appeared. The U.S. Newspaper Times The Hill Times published an article by China expert Gordon Chang putting forward an estimate that China may have as many as 47.5 million homeless people. Shenzhen was once called the window of China's reform and opening up, a paradise for high-tech, finance, and entrepreneurship. If even a city like Shenzhen has so many homeless people, what exactly has gone wrong with China? One young man, after seeing the crowds on Shenzhen's streets, publicly declared that he wanted to run for mayor in order to speak for the bottom layer of society. The first category is people who can no longer afford rent after losing their jobs. What is even more shocking is that among them are some who are very young, recent university graduates, laid-off white-collar workers, factory workers who have lost their jobs, or people who previously lived by delivering food or driving ride-hailing cars. It is not that they do not want to work. It is that they cannot find work that allows them to survive. At midnight by a Nanjing subway entrance, an interviewer sat down with a man sleeping on cardboard. How old are you? Born in 68, 59. How long in Nanjing? March. Greening in a park. Three days. No more work. He had no money. The clothes, the quilt, the watermelon, the pears, the corn, all from bins. Scrape the top, he said. And you can eat. He had not eaten that day. The second category is people crushed by debt. Mortgages, car loans, credit cards, online loans, once income is interrupted, a life that previously looked normal can collapse completely in a short time. Some cannot even pay the rent. Some cannot keep their homes. Some have fallen into massive debt and dare not go home. In Hangzhou, a man in his second year in the city said he had already been unemployed for half a month and homeless for six days. He had met two younger men in the same situation. One, surnamed Wang from Hainan, was 20 years old. He had come looking for work, found none, and had been homeless for half a month with only the clothes on his back. Another 20-year-old from Jiangxi had come for tourism, been scammed of all his money, and was now jobless and homeless. He still owed 5,000 yuan on a 10,000 yuan high-interest online loan. A man from Nanyang, Hainan, said he had wandered for three years. The third category is people whose families have broken down, elderly people with memory loss, and those who have long lacked social support. Some have already been living on the streets for many years. This exposes a larger problem. Where is the government's social security? Where is the rescue system? What is urban management doing? What is often seen is not the government solving the problem, but driving these people from one place to another. In some places, the homeless are not treated as people who need help, but as people who affect the city's image. One young man who has been homeless for many years runs whenever he sees people, like a startled bird. He is afraid others will hurt him. If a government has the ability to build skyscrapers, high-speed rail, and giant infrastructure, yet does not have the ability to give an unemployed person a place to sleep, then where exactly does the problem lie? Behind the rising numbers lie China's real estate bubble, local government debt, corporate layoffs, youth unemployment, falling incomes, and insufficient social security, the economic and governance model formed over many past years. China has always emphasized how strong the Chinese economy is, how high the GDP is, how fast the high-speed rail is, how many skyscrapers the cities have. But the true prosperity of a country should not only be measured by how many tall buildings it has, but by how the people at the very bottom of society are living. Why would a country that claims to have achieved moderate prosperity across the board allow more and more people to become homeless? That is the question truly worth thinking about behind the figure of 47.5 million. Post-00-slash-full-of-resentment-attack-their-elders, a fight that lets the CCP walk away. A mainland essay by a post-00s writer using the name Juju Gilai has gone after the post-50s, 60s, and 70s as inferior ancestors. High prices. Workplace grind. Thin welfare. Ruined families. All of it, the piece says, is the bill those generations left unpaid. The buildings you built, we are still paying the mortgages on. The roads you built, we are still stuck in traffic on. The coal you burned, the mountains you stripped bare, the rivers you drained dry, the plastic you dumped into the sea, we are still breathing the haze, drinking microplastics, and paying the climate debt. We do not deny the hardships you endured, but the debts you owe don't think you can just walk away from them. The dodge is the point. The Chinese Communist Party wrote the policies. The essay never names it. Housing costs did not float up because grandparents felt like it. The center indulged the bubble. Local governments farmed land sales. Infrastructure mania filled officials' pockets and Beijing's tax chest. Coal. Stripped hills. Dead rivers were the party's growth model. The older generations breathed that air too. They were not the authors. So why the righteous tone? Either Jiujiu Gilai is chasing clicks by handing angry post, 00S, a target they can shout at across the dinner table, or the piece is doing what CCP opinion work always does. Move the fight off the government and onto civilians. Call the parents the enemy, and the party sits this one out. The argument does not hold. Corruption is not a birth year trait. Political tightening under Xi Jinping, the state crowding out private firms, wolf warrior diplomacy, none of that was cooked up by people who came of age, short of food and school. Those cohorts went through the Cultural Revolution and up to the mountains, down to the countryside. They could not choose a partner freely. After marriage, they were allowed one child. They ate unemployment and low pay while holding up parents and kids. Reform gave them a few ordinary years. Then they got old. Post, 00S arrived after that opening. Fed, schooled, only children, six adults hovering, screens, travel. The squeeze Jiujiu Gilai lists is national. It is not a private inheritance from dad. The older generations did not spend their pain suing grandpa. They looked at the system. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were Lin Zhao, Yu Luok, Zhang Zhishin. After it, Fang Lizhi, Lu Binyan, Wang Ruoxue, Yan Jiaqi, Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli. June 4th took Bao Zengxin, Dai Qing, Qin Benli, students and Beijing residents on the square. Later came Lu Xiaobo, Gao Yu, and lawyers Wang Kuanzhong, Gao Zhisheng, Xu Zhiyong. They paid. They did not bill the previous household. Stirring hate between age groups solves nothing for the young and nothing for the old. It is useful only to the party. While Chinese people accuse each other, the CCP enjoys clear weather and watches the tigers fight. If Post, 00S won a target that matches the damage, it is the party. If the ledger has to run by generation, the charge belongs with those who helped put a one-party state in place a century ago, not with the people who lived under it. Even that is a shortcut. Each cohort is boxed by its time. Complaining about inferior ancestors, unless it is deliberate cover, is political immaturity. History, current policy, and a public that wakes up are the only tools that change a life. The CCP is counting on the other argument. South China Sea, smells of gunpowder, China piles, radar islands, Philippines, bets on drones. New satellite photos show the Chinese Communist Party pouring concrete on Antelope Reef and Yagong Island in the Paracels. A three-pronged structure that looks like radar has gone up. Beijing still talks about civilian use and weather research. Military officers reading the same pictures call it an early warning station meant to lock the northern South China Sea and sit as a forward post if the Taiwan Strait blows. Open-source monitors say a Chinese dredging fleet started heavy work on those two features late in 2025. By August, an artificial island nearly six kilometers long was in place, with a straight three-kilometer shoreline that outsiders read as a future strip. Manila is not waiting. On August 25, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro told Congress he wants the defense budget up 6.3% in one step. Modernization alone would get 50 billion pesos, more than $800 million, a 25% jump from this year. A big slice is drones and unmanned surface craft, plus more missile patrol boats. The Philippines cannot match the PLA Navy hull for hull. It is switching from hunting rebels at home to an asymmetric fight with U, S, and Ukrainian kit, and rewriting the mission as external defense. The party's South China Sea build has three jobs. Push the radar and runway line hundreds of kilometers forward so a Taiwan fight can block U, S. Help coming up from the south. Sit on the busiest sea lanes in East Asia and hold energy and trade as bargaining chips. Treat the whole sea as an interior lake through daily Coast Guard pressure and occupation, and ignore the law that says otherwise. Neighbors are answering in kind. Vietnam is reclaiming in the Spratlys. The Philippines is buying eyes and small missiles. Manila is tightening with the United States, Japan, and Australia, using the mutual defense treaty and joint drills as the backstop. Analysts say the harder line is not a mood. After repeated blockades at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal, another concession invites the next grab. If you cannot win a ship fight, U.S. cover plus drones is what is left. Ben Lewis, an American open source analyst, put it without the weather station language. The northern South China Sea is a lifeline in any Taiwan war. Radars and a strip on Antelope Reef and Yagong Island turn those rocks into the outpost you want if you mean to paint U.S. Forces coming from the south. Singapore's Colin Koh said Yagong is small but right for a standalone early warning site. Pair it with the almost three-kilometer run on Antelope Reef and the PLA gets all weather watch over the parasails. Damien Simon and the satellite firm Vantor noted the buildings match other Chinese military bases in the sea. Scattered reefs are being wired into one cluster. Sending gray hulls into a shoving match hands Beijing an excuse to escalate. Drones that film around the clock cost little and put pictures in front of the world the same day. That is how you fight a gray zone without giving the bigger navy the clash it can script. U.S. Philippine work is no longer leftover hardware. AI and unmanned systems from the United States and Ukraine mean tactics, not just inventory. Treaty behind, drones in front. The calculation in Beijing changes. The water cannon years are not the end state. Artificial islands and radar nets on one side dense unmanned watch on the other and the contest moves into signals, jamming and machines that do not blink. The board is getting tighter. The smell of powder is not weather.