political economist and sociologist, JHU; all views my own; enjoy exch with folks with diverse views/convictions; will block abrasive commentators w/o apology
1/6 There is still a lot of talk about Russia shifting to the yuan so the sanction will only advance international use and status of the yuan vis-a-vis USD. This is seriously misplaced..
We often view world politics from the perspectives of great powers. In the age of inter-imperiality, we badly need more theories about small states, about how they persevere, shape their own destines, and make world history at the interstices of empires.
a brilliant paper arguing the USD hegemony is grounded on US geopolitical power, as 3/4 of safe USD assets are held by govts with military tie to the US. hence weaponizing USD via sanctions won't jeopardize USD hegemony. the problem of this analysis is...🧵
in the late 1970s when the Khmer Rouge's atrocity became obvious, he attacked the refugees for making stuffs up to discredit the revolutionary regime to please western journalists and officials hostile to comrade Pol Pot. it is beyond delusional.
Same old dangerous ideology treating everyone with Chinese heritage as subject of the PRC party-state, putting Chinese diaspora around the world in jeopardy.
heart-breaking and in-depth report on Chinese who "run"/escape from China -- getting to Ecuador visa-free, then going onto a long march to the US border as refugees.
Orientalists always tell u Confucianism is about harmony but never tells u it's also about hierarchy. You have harmony when everyone knows their place and never transgresses existing hierarchy
This spanish news outlet got the shot right before Hu was escorted away: he appared to try to open the folder with the CC member list, Li Zhanshu stopped him and seized his folder; Xi then called sby to take Hu away...
4/6 Russia can get yuan thru the ruble-yuan swap line, using the now worthless ruble in exchange for yuan, and than use the yuan to pay for its trade deficit with China. In the end, it is little more than China giving out supplies to Russia for free as a disaster relief.
while the RMB remains inconvertible, it can't challenge the euro, yen, let alone the USD. lifting forex control is the last thing the CCP desires. Countries with troubled currencies often advocate RMB replacing the USD. what they actually want is to...
6/6 In any of the scenarios, it won't advance yuan's international use, which requires two countries not involving China settle their transaction in yuan.
Both Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un won the top job with 100% of the votes. John Lee won with 99% only. This one percent difference shows one country, two systems are real and well.🇨🇳🇭🇰💖㊗️✌️
a guy refused to call a rape a rape. he called it a conflict between two persons, saying he dislikes conflict and advocates dialogue, emphasizing nobody should call the police as it would only escalate the tension. can we trust this guy as a jury?
I agree. without US obstruction, Putin would have swallowed Ukraine whole and the war would have ended long ago. just as US was the biggest obstacle to ending the Japan-China conflict in the 1930s and 1940s! 😤
A short old piece. 🇨🇳 (&🇷🇺)has genuine resentment against established powers. The resentment is more like Germany' s & Japan's resentment against the British empire a century ago. Junior empires wanted to be treated as equals by the old empire. they're all empires nonetheless.
5/6 or Russia can absorb yuan by letting Chinese entities buy Russian assets and pay in yuan, and then use the yuan to pay for Chinese supplies. In such case, it is like using stakes in Russian property/companies in exchange for Chinese relief.
in 1975, HKU student union called for all HK ppl to boycott the Queen's visit, saying the visit was an insult to all Chinese in HK. nobody got arrested and penalized the union president at the time was Mak Hoi-wah, who later...
2/6 Russia-China trade did undergo de-dollarization over the last decade, but mostly through switching to euro. Russia has been running trade deficit with China (who doesn't?). Basically Russia uses the euro they earns in selling stuffs to Europe to pay for China imports..
this has bee a rigid party line all along. by denying HK colony status and taking HK off the UN colony list in 1972, BJ stripped HKers of the right to self-determination under the UN decolonization declaration, as I explained in City on the Edge.
irony of history: JP Morgan CEO just joked that his bank, also celebrating centennial, will outlive the CCP; In 1993, Zhu Rongji assured his anxious cadres that the CCP would not collapse like the USSR because it had the backing of Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks
3/6 In 2020 80+ % of Russia-China trade was settled in euro (). If Russia-China trade shifts to yuan under the sanction now, it means Russia has to come up with the yuan to pay for its trade deficit with China...
1 of 4: lots of talk about Russia and other countries will start shifting away from SWIFT to China's CIP system. The CIP system is a yuan-based system. To shift to CIP significantly, you need to have major settlements in yuan and accumulated lots of yuan first....
the naive attempt to find the NSL's red line is futile, coz there is no red line. everyone is targeted. just a matter of your queue number. they literally follow the Carl Schmitt playbook: constant state of emergency; everyone can be the sovereign's enemy.
extremely interesting legal history of the trial of Ho Chi Minh in British HK in the early 1930s. Ho owed his life to the rule of law and reluctance of the HK authorities to extradite political dissidents. Those are all gone in 2020.
Xi'an is the Tang empire's capital where tribute vassals came to pay tribute. the character "Tang" is everywhere. the emperor greeting his vassal vibe is strong. Westphalia is dead. Long live Tianxia! the new world order is great.
The staging of the welcoming of leaders at China-Central-Asia summit is simply bizarre for a supposedly communist country, invoking palace attire and accessories of Chinese emperors
starting in c 2012 i made the case that China was entering a long slowdown and the USD hegemony was here to stay. most academic were in disbelief as if i was the only idiot in denial. now a new consensus is emerging
S Korean president didn't meet Pelosi when she's there saying he was on vacation. Now China announced it would start live-fire exercise in Yellow Sea right by S Korea Aug 6-15
nationalist scholars in China have been writing about the Okinawa question for more than a decade. some explicitly tied it to the Taiwan question. "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" won't stop at TW. it's official now.
a bookstore is still selling Martin Jacques' _When China rules the world_. so sad the whole argument is premised on the filmsy graph on the left: China GDP (current $) will surpass the US in 2018. it didn't happen. now the Economist is saying it will never happen.
folks singing the chorus of "Chinese economy is not that bad" should launch a lobby team, travel to Beijing, and tell Xi it is not necessary to black out all the econ data as there is actually no bad news to hide.
beside the two mugs of tea, i also don't understand why only the non-Hans wears their ethnic customs (upper right) while the Hans are not wearing Hanfu. China is strong enough not to wear westerners' suits
many tried to explain why USD hegemony stays on. a bigger puzzle is perhaps why the US has not decayed like 17th-C Spain while it controled the world money -- American silver. Hamilton, Vilar, Keynes detailed how Spain's control of world money actually led to its decline.. 1/7
this china's official story confirmed the rumor that Russia has been dumping RMB it gained thru currency swap for USD and euro to cope with its falling energy export income in the first half of the year.
they shouldn't be angry. the beaten-to-death prof's daughter blames humanity instead of the poitical system for the tragedy. as a solution, she invites aliens to enslave earth rather than seeking regime change in China. an "all of humanity pays for China problem" scenario?
Roger Waters is just another fading babyboomer who tries very hard to posture as a young non-conformist radical by pretending it is still 1968 and making u forget 1968 was more than half century ago and by definition, very old.
so ironically, the CCP regime that prioritizes absolute state control of credits and refuses to liberalize its financial system is a key condition perpetuating the USD hegemony. end🧵
fun fact: official name of former East Germany is German Democratic Republic, Cambodia under Khmer Rouge is Democratic Kampuchea, and North Korea is, of course, Democratic People's Republic of Korea
in the meantime, AfD is the friendliest party to Beijing. its leader Alice Weidel was a China hand -- spoke fluent mandarin, worked in China for Bank of China for six yrs, and wrote a Phd diss on China's pension system. Beijing did take notice....
On the face of it, the AfD leadership proposing that Germany holding a referendum on leaving EU seems crazy. But in fact it does nicely pick our their supporters.
tired of the polar opposite between the "China collapse" & "China rules the world" talks. what about the scenario of "economy deteriorates beyond repair while the regime strenghtens"? we have plentiful examples: N Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela.
what happened to Jack Ma happened to many in the Qing era. when business elite got too influential they would be persecuted by the state. business dynasty like the Rothschilds couldn't emerge in China despite advanced market economy back then.
this is shocking. i thought all those feeble western sanctions are self-defeating and don't cause any trouble to China. they are responsible for all problems in China now? must be the reason ppl stop having kids. 💡
in case you're not aware: there are many many many anti-colonial movements that successfully defeated colonial rule without resorting to massacring and kidnapping civilians and children in music festival. the ANC destroyed apartheid proper without doing anything near ever.
Surprise, suprise: Asians are not all the same; the progaganda campaign trying to equate criticizing chinese policy with anti-Asian hate doesn't work for Asian Americans; and it is bad practice saying nihao to everyone.
China is falling into a “balance-sheet recession," according to the economist who coined the phrase to explain Japan’s descent into stagnation in the 1990s
pop change in HK by age gp from Dec 2021 to June 2022. 11.8%, 23.4% and 8.6% of ppl disappeared in just six month among the 15-19, 20-24, 25-29 age gp. I bet most of them have left for the great opps in the Great Bay Area. horray!
in retrospect, it is a grandiose exercise of self-orientalism, celebrating the triumph of oriental collectivism (if not despotism). that was peak China Boom, a "good" time to reflect on.
to me Jonathan Spence's greatest contribution is the popularization of the idea that modern China did not start in 1850 but in c.1500, when many modern problems originated with the influx of American silver and crops. CCP obsession with mid-Qing monarchs is no accident
after the HK-mainland border reopening, the expected mainlanders influx never materialized in HK. now well-to-do mainlanders prefer SE Asia and Ireland to visit and move their money to. HK under NSL is no longer a fun and safe place for them, sorry!
HK's Professional Teachers' Union has been staunchly anti-colonial and Chinese nationalist in its ideology. It thrived under British rule but now has to disband under Chinese rule. Who can still say HK enjoys more freedom now than the colonial period?
since May 4, crushing Confucianism was a main theme of the Chinese Revolution. upholding Confucianism was always the business of the KMT and even British colonial state in HK (to promote subservience to a monarchy). the CCP rediscovery of Confucianism really says a lot...
wow didn't know this Wang Huning 1991 book that diagnosed US decline had an English translation already. probably the single most sig idea that shapes XJP belief in China's invincibility in the US-China struggle and help explains why he's doing what he does. No?
it's not like things suddenly turn dark. For Liu Xiaobo, rights lawyers, Tibetans and many others, things have been equally dark under Hu Jintao and now. It's just that its finally the princelings', little pinks', & robber barons' turn to worry now.
less than 2 wks ago they kept saying only silly ppl would believe China, with its high-tech satellites, would send balloons to the US. now they are silly enough to believe US would send balloons. that is okay, even if you don't provide any photos or any other evidence.
consciously or not, there are kissingers in many of us -- who think only great powers relations matter; smaller states & ppl there are all sideshows, expendable.
//the Bank of Russia...explains that Russian exporters and importers suffer from currency risks when settling their trade in the non-convertible and volatile renminbi. ...there are not enough derivatives for traders to hedge the Chinese currency.//
Everybody is talking about Taiwan in Munich when Taiwan cannot even be there; about a century ago, Czechoslovakia's fate was negotiated in Munich (!) when no Czechs were there. sth in the international system never changed.
finished season 1 on netflix. about Beijing's MSS infiltration into australian gov't , transnational repression, etc. shocking that it was a 2016 series, not b'coz it's prophetic but that the creator was not attacked for being paranoid and burned at the stake back then.
last year some people complained their schools did not allow them to zoom from home and asked them to go back to office to zoom. they should take comfort that John Kerry just flew all the way to Tianjin to zoom with Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi instead of doing it in his basement
whenever sino-western relation gets tense, some become nostalgic about the western respect of China among the Jesuits and early Enlightenment thinkers. they long for a revival of their admiration. but many of the +ve images of China back then were distortions and lies.... 1/9 🧵
swap their troubled currencies with RMB. but they can't use the RMB for anything other than buying Chinese goods. This is amount to asking for alms in kind from China. a good trick. at least better than the AR-BR common currency fantasy.
500 words to summarize why Lenin's _Imperialism_ offers the best theoretical insights for understanding US-China rivalry. A book on this is on the way.
i assure you the petition won't cancel him. he'll be in oscar. i even didn't bother to sign. Hollywood 's wokism is the "you'll get cancelled for using the wrong pronounce but collaborating with a genocide is okay" kind of woke.
starting my sabbatical with holiday re-reading of Said. feeling intellectually rejuvenated with his 1985 critique of Marxists and Third-Worldists whose hidden epistemological orientalism made them fall for horrible tyrannts in the post-colonial world.
1/4 Can't repeat enough: we need to separate the discussion of China policy with the fight against anti-Asian racism. They are simply different things. Would a softer China policy really tame anti-Asian racism? ...
when Stephen Roach says HK is over, it's no good. HK as we know it is over, but BJ has another plan for HK by turning it into a BRI nexus, a crypto center, a Russia-friendly market, etc.. as i note in a recent presentation in Academia Sinica... 1/2
work in progress. challenging to condense 70k words of arguments into one table. tried it anyway for the concluding chapter: genealogy of 8 centuries of largely bs about China.
the myth and faith about competent authoritarian rule have dissolved; after passing this psychological barrier, ppl start seeing the leaders and the world in diff way, irreversably; things will get more volatile in 2023 and beyond
Strategic patience, strategic autonomy, strategic dialogue, strategic partners,.... Does everything sound smarter and legit if we add a "strategic" qualifier no matter what? In that spirit, I declare I'm strategically lazy. Am about to have a strategic nap.