For an external drive? I guess I have never experienced that since external drives are already pretty slow.

Yeah, you will generally have a better time with exFAT, which is a format both Windows and Linux works with well. All my external drives get formatted as such.

The money will instead be redirected to critical health care construction projects.

This seems fine.

Is there a source on this?

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.