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

Jordan Schneider

Oct 18, 2020

Two weeks’ worth this edition!

𝘚𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘑. 𝘋𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 @StevenJDuffield

This is an amazing chart. Gallup.

So we can’t agree on that, but we can agree on this….

Republicans are more negative toward China than Democrats, though all partisans hold increasingly unfavorable views

Nice job MOFA!

James Palmer @BeijingPalmer

China Daily @ChinaDaily

A wave of anti-China sentiment is spreading across the globe. Who is behind this anti-China propaganda? 🎬 Watch and find out in the latest episode of China Daily's Western #MediaUnlocked documentary series: Unmasking Hypocrisy and Propaganda. @friendlyjordies @ajitxsingh https://t.co/JpdMXNbb2E

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

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??

Rex Chapman🏇🏼 @RexChapman

So - this center fielder robbed a home-run but pretended he didn’t - allowing the batter to run the bases before letting-on. Fantastic...

TikTok stock pitch: “I don’t know shit about $NIO…”

Manya Koetse @manyapan

Ah excellent idea. Turn your crawling baby into a human mop with this "baby mop suit". Baby needs to work for his milk!

XIRAN, Chinese History Educational Memer @XiranJayZhao

good day to all Chinese history enthusiasts except for Ming dynasty stans who clearly only stan it because they support Han supremacy

XIRAN, Chinese History Educational Memer @XiranJayZhao

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

foreignpolicy.comXinjiang’s Hui Muslims Were Swept Into Camps Alongside UighursTestimonies and eyewitness accounts suggest the mass incarceration of ethnic Hui in China’s northwest.

Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno

America is run by lawyers; China is run by engineers. Engineers are pragmatic. Their key text is the science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which, as in most of his books, survival is everything, and scientists make tough choices

lrb.co.ukWang Xiuying · China after Covid · LRB 22 October 2020Since China tamed the virus and normal life resumed, the CCP has bestowed its highest honours on key scientists and...

Super pragmatic to throw 1.5m Uighurs in camps amirite!?

[the linked article, unlike the tweet above, is actually good and worth a read]

𝕋𝕙𝕖 🕷𝕚𝕤𝕥💀𝕣𝕪 𝕠𝕗 ℂ𝕙𝕚𝕟👻 ℙ🎃𝕕𝕔𝕒𝕤𝕥 @THoC_Podcast

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.

Covell Meyskens @cfmeyskens

"Kissinger is a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy." - Mao Zedong

https://www.deepl.com/ for my money is better than Google/Baidu/Youdao Translate, but still a little wonky at times:

Bill Bishop @niubi

@jordanschnyc @DeepLcom love the translation "the global pandemic of neocon pneumonia". a useful tool for sure, still far from 100% reliable

Jorge Guajardo @jorge_guajardo

I’ve 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.

Jorge Guajardo @jorge_guajardo

As I was being given the tour, I took particular interest in the aircraft component (I’m 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.

Jorge Guajardo @jorge_guajardo

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 didn’t strike me as a “Made In China” export (takes more space than labor, it’s all plastic wings). So I asked about them.

Jorge Guajardo @jorge_guajardo

At this point, the person giving me the tour was getting uncomfortable and told the big-shot that we couldn’t 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.

Jorge Guajardo @jorge_guajardo

When I asked why they were manufacturing those ultralights in China, the big boss responded, “those are for invading Taiwan”. Just like that. “We 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 it”.

XIRAN, Chinese History Educational Memer @XiranJayZhao

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.

优述/You Shu @You_Shu_China

Honest question: What is the rationale, if you support US coop on climate w/ China, for “giving away” 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?

Sixth Tone @SixthTone

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 didn’t exist.

Rebecca Davis @rebeccaludavis

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."

variety.comDisney Defends ‘Mulan’ Credits That Thanked Chinese Government Entities Involved in Human Rights AbusesDisney’s president of film production Sean Bailey defended the controversial credits for the new live-action “Mulan” film, which thanked Chinese government entities directly involved in perpetuating human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as being part of “standard practice across the film industry worldwi…

The fact that after two months this is all they could get themselves to say shows just how much they’re beholden. Would’ve been something if Bob Iger actually ran for president and had to defend this.