Tweets of the Month
Weapons of Ego Destruction, Demographics, Technocracy, Jonathan Spence
I'm obsessed with this animation of human population relative to modern nations since 10000 BCE. India grows steadily, China jumps up and down, Mexico collapses in 1500 after being 3rd largest for millennia... There's so much here! It's wild!
Source: reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti…
Peak Chinese technocracy is Xi'an gov't urging people not to show their health codes 'unless necessary' because of server overload
Winner of 2020’s new kanji contest in Japan: the character 座 (seat), ingeniously redesigned as a neologism for “social distance.”
Note the two 人(person) radicals in the original 座are now positioned farther away from one another!
Runners up: sousaku-kanji.com/?fbclid=IwAR2q…
A fantastic thread
New plan: I want to stitch together voice memos of folks’ reflections on Spence for an episode. Looking for a wide range of perspectives from colleagues and PhD students to simply fans of his books. Please dm or email me at jorschneider@gmail.com
Jordan Schneider @jordanschnyc
Offer still stands: please email me your recollections to jorschneider@gmail.com. Here’s a guide to recording a voice memo.
Also, I’m having Paul Kennedy on ChinaTalk next week to discuss his 40-year friendship with Jonathan Spence and whatever else I can come up with. Let me know what I should ask.
Now that @e_sarotte has written a book using extensive new archival documents and interview material to investigate NATO expansion, I hope someone writes a similar book on engagement with China in the 1990s.
M.E. Sarotte @e_sarotte
Write this book and I will cover it on ChinaTalk!
“Let’s study military technique to ensure victory” — Spanish poster published by the Communist Party in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1937).
A thread on TikTok-Douyin decoupling (or lack thereof) thru some fun OSINT sleuthing:
Having read recent reports on ties between TikTok and DouYin(/Bytedance), which mostly relied on indirect evidence, I wanted to see if I could find some more direct data. (1/n)
Last year, I stumbled upon a group of TikTok accounts used by China-based Bytedance software/testing engineers to test various aspects of the app. This week, I expanded the list to ~1,300 by looking at accounts followed by/following known accounts. (2/n)
Thread. Air Moving Device doing god’s work…
Good news everybody!
The excellent @J_B_C16 and I teamed up (again!) to analyze what #China's rise in #semiconductors means for #EU. It's not 60 pages and 300 references like the last one (sorry).
Reading this are 20min well spent, promise!
stiftung-nv.de/en/node/3187
Best think tank cover art of 2021. And a good paper to boot!
Being rich in China is no funny business:
"Among the 72 billionaires, 15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, seven died from accidents, 14 were executed according to the law and 19 died from diseases."
Reading more books about writing hits different now that I do it a lot more. My drafts (of which I have so many) always die of momentum
“The best is when it’s fresh and too hot to handle” 😂
Just thinking about how much this shelf would have been worth in England in the year 1600. Presumably at least tens of millions in today’s money.
