Tweets of the Week: Taiwanese Baseball Trickery, MOFA Can't Catch a Break, Baby as Mop
Also: 'Fire Chicken' and 'Sea Pig', Attack of the Clones, Global Warming, Fake Subway Stations, Mulan, Forced Labor Garlic
Two weeksβ worth this edition!
So we canβt agree on that, but we can agree on thisβ¦.
Nice job MOFA!
China Daily @ChinaDaily
South Korea: *gets rich using national-level industrial policy, without big increase in inequality*
China: *gets middle-class using privatization, tax breaks, and foreign corporate investment, with huge increase in inequality*
Leftists: CHINA PROVES SOCIALISM WORKS! Korea who??
So - this center fielder robbed a home-run but pretended he didnβt - allowing the batter to run the bases before letting-on.
Fantastic...
TikTok stock pitch: βI donβt know shit about $NIOβ¦β
Ah excellent idea. Turn your crawling baby into a human mop with this "baby mop suit". Baby needs to work for his milk!
good day to all Chinese history enthusiasts except for Ming dynasty stans who clearly only stan it because they support Han supremacy
also outing myself: I am not 100% Han. From my dad's side, I have Hui Chinese heritage, which is a minority ethnic group descended from Islamic Silk Road traders
Unfortunately, the Hui are being sent to concentration camps alongside the Uighurs now
America is run by lawyers; China is run by engineers. Engineers are pragmatic. Their key text is the science fiction writer Liu Cixinβs The Three-Body Problem, in which, as in most of his books, survival is everything, and scientists make tough choices
Super pragmatic to throw 1.5m Uighurs in camps amirite!?
[the linked article, unlike the tweet above, is actually good and worth a read]
Dear China:
If you only read 1 piece of Western literature that will inform your entire worldview, understanding, and decision toward about the West in its entirety...
make sure is the 2002 novelization of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
https://www.deepl.com/ for my money is better than Google/Baidu/Youdao Translate, but still a little wonky at times:
@jordanschnyc @DeepLcom love the translation "the global pandemic of neocon pneumonia". a useful tool for sure, still far from 100% reliable
Iβve told this story before but recent PRC-Taiwan tensions bear retelling. In 2007 I visited the Hafei Motor Works campus in Harbin. An impressive campus that encompasses an auto-plant, an Embraer jet assembly plant, and an Augusta helicopter plant. All in partnership w/ Chinese.
As I was being given the tour, I took particular interest in the aircraft component (Iβm a pilot), so they took me into the big hangars where they had the finished helicopters. I noticed a big number of ultralights and those definitely got my attention.
The reason the ultralights got my attention is because there is/was no general aviation in China. People were not allowed to fly ultralights, and these didnβt strike me as a βMade In Chinaβ export (takes more space than labor, itβs all plastic wings). So I asked about them.
At this point, the person giving me the tour was getting uncomfortable and told the big-shot that we couldnβt continue further into the hangar, which the big boss took as a loss of face and quickly overruled him. There were at least 150 ultralights in there, an impressive sight.
When I asked why they were manufacturing those ultralights in China, the big boss responded, βthose are for invading Taiwanβ. Just like that. βWe can fly thousands over-the-sea, under radar, and land them on the beaches, we may lose some over the sea, but thousands will make itβ.
in Chinese we stopped making new characters in the past few hundred years, so for new stuff we have to combine existing characters, resulting in -
Turkey: FIRE CHICKEN
Giraffe: LONG-NECKED DEER
Dolphin: SEA PIG
Penguin: BUSINESS GOOSE
Kangaroo: POUCHED RAT
Hippo: RIVER HORSE
Click through below for a really interesting debate featuring Adam Tooze and leading western China climate policy expert Lauri Myllyvirta who will be coming on the ChinaTalk podcast in the next few weeks.
Honest question: What is the rationale, if you support US coop on climate w/ China, for βgiving awayβ other things in the US-China relationship to get that? Surely now we know Beijing is either interested in reducing emissions or not & nothing DC offers will change that. Or no?
A property developer in the eastern Shandong province was accused of luring potential home buyers by putting up a sign for a subway station that didnβt exist.
In a letter to @MPIainDS, Disney said it chose to film "Mulan" in Xinjiang "in the interest of authenticity." It said that the controversial end credits (that thank Xinjiang govt depts) are in line w "standard practice across the film industry worldwide."
The fact that after two months this is all they could get themselves to say shows just how much theyβre beholden. Wouldβve been something if Bob Iger actually ran for president and had to defend this.
Should I turn Tweets of the Week into a βSunday funniesβ sort of thing? Kind of like it as a standalone, curious for your thoughts.