Tweets of the Week: Elon vs China, How Xi Stays in Power, BIS, Baijiu Vending Machines
In 1981, Deng wrote a 'Resolution on History,' only the 2nd in CCP history, to close the chapter on the Mao era and convince the Chinese people that the CCP wasn't rotten to the core.
Xi will release his own Resolution this week. To prepare, let's take a look back!
THREAD:
First, some context. The Chinese people had just lived through 10 years of some of the most dysfunctional governance in human history. As Wang Jisheng writes, the experience of the CR crushed popular faith in the CCP.
google.com/books/edition/…
Most people remember Deng's resolution as blaming Mao. But what struck out to me most is how much of it is making the case that actually Mao and the CCP weren't all terrible, that China shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Now onto the text!
Click through above for a whole thread on what it’s like to reread the document.
A quick summary of my new op-ed
▪️The Third Road: Where will Xi Jinping go in 2022▪️ published by @MIC_Journal
3 reasons why I think reactivating Party Chairman is an optimal path to take, from Xi's perspective, in 2022.
bit.ly/3CBMkT5
Thread. 1/
Important thread
Chinese “how to succeed at work” guides are wild. If your boss openly compliments you at work, watch out, apparently that’s to make you into a public enemy, so everyone else can be against you, thus making sure you’re never irreplaceable 😱
More and more people are embracing open-source research on China. I think that's great.
But if you don't know what you're doing, this business can be risky—for you, your organization, and the entire field.
That's why I've created this guide:
Yasheng Huang's 2008 book throws a monkey wrench into the linear, economic liberalizing narrative that has become so popular (stopping, as is erroneously held, under Xi). In fact, economic and political liberalism underwent major set backs as far back as the 1990s.
China led Q3 in both the number and payload mass of orbital rocket launches, according to the latest @BryceSpaceTech report.
Kilograms of mass launched:
CASC🇨🇳45,010
SpaceX🇺🇸32,634
Arianespace🇪🇺25,881
Roscosmos🇷🇺20,500
Northrop Grumman🇺🇸5,358
ULA🇺🇸2,888
brycetech.com/briefing
This is nuts...SpaceX is set to overtake China in Q4.
Who would win...the most powerful totalitarian state ever to deface the Earth
...or one completely insane and hopelessly erratic (but perversely intelligent) business bro?
@Noahpinion @BeijingPalmer
Michael Sheetz @thesheetztweetz
Elon Musk is a living, breathing reminder that one of America's chief strengths is its ability to let total freaks do incredible things, provided they have the ability to actually DO IT.
This is a man of obsession and madness, a man of profound insanity and shitposting, a man who definitely inherited psychological problems, but by some perverse miracle is forward-thinking and absurdly effective.
Xi must be thinking "How the actual f**k is he beating me?"
NEW: A lack of top-tier intelligence on Xi Jinping’s inner circle is frustrating senior Biden administration officials, according to current and former officials who have reviewed the most sensitive U.S. intelligence reports
Important piece.
Famously a unified country for 5,000 years that never needed @real_QinHuangdi to unify it, never had a civil war, a Taiping Rebellion, an An Lushan Rebellion, a Three Kingdoms era, or, you know, a dynastic cycle that left millions dead every time it circled
Manya Koetse @manyapan
A trip back to great of Chinese history - Cao’an temple 草庵.
What makes this small Yuan stone hall globally significant is a carved icon: an image of Mani, the Iranian prophet and founder of Manichaeism - & the only such icon left in the world of one time rival to Christianity.
For uninitiated, Manichaeism was an evangelising religion from 3rd century Persia. It got a foothold in Turkestan when the Uighur kingdom adopted it in 8th century - whence entered Tang China with temples in a number of cities, before a later purge.
Ruins of Uighur Gaochang 2/5
I love these threads