Is there a source on this?

Weird. Do they not have the equivalent of CoinStar there? It’s a nice occasional boost when the coin jar gets full.

around half of the ammunition sent last month was so old that it needed to be sent to Russian factories for refurbishment

I feel like if an artillery shell is in such bad condition it needs refurbishment, it would be easier to just make a new shell instead.

An artillery shell is literally just explosives and an outer shell. The primer is added later. Are they sanding off the rust and refilling it with explosives?

Time to go to your closest museum and get a penny squished and imprinted!

Melting a modern penny is actually kinda neat. The zinc on the inside melts first, which turns the whole thing into a blobby copper flask. Then at some point the copper rips and all the zinc pours out.

You can do it with any small torch.

Yeah, they effectively don’t matter. People can do whatever they want with them. Most will continue to sit in the jar they have lived in the last 10 years.

China barely pays their workers. Hell, they don’t even let you use services in the city you live in unless you were born there. Lots of people travel to the cities seasonally since they are prevented from doing anything reasonable where they work.

It’s not surprising they don’t want to spend, China has engineered an economy where huge portions of the domestic population have no spending power or even a stable place to live.