Tweets of the Month

Weapons of Ego Destruction, Demographics, Technocracy, Jonathan Spence

Tessa Alexanian @tessafyi

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…

Tianyu M. Fang @tianyuf

Peak Chinese technocracy is Xi'an gov't urging people not to show their health codes 'unless necessary' because of server overload

Gregory Adam Scott 史瑞戈 😾 @sudasana

@bokane I always show this image the first day of my Classical Chinese class

eileen chengyin chow @chowleen

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

Jordan Schneider @jordanschnyc

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

Seems like there’s a moment in everyone’s China-watching journey where they read their first Jonathan Spence book and immediately drop everything else they’re doing so they can devour the corpus. Would love to do a retrospective ep, who wants to be a guest? https://t.co/lwvHDCsTrP

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.

Joseph Torigian @JosephTorigian

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

Thank you @FT, @frederick65, and @battlelaura for selecting NOT ONE INCH as a "Book to Read in 2022." It's an honor to be on this list with @gideonrachman, @Yascha_Mounk, and many other great writers... https://t.co/pt3WQiYCNd @yalepress @YaleBooks

Write this book and I will cover it on ChinaTalk!

Propagandopolis @propagandopolis

“Let’s study military technique to ensure victory” — Spanish poster published by the Communist Party in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1937).

Brendan O'Kane @bokane

finally figured out what to get everybody this year

Air-Moving Device @AirMovingDevice

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)

Air-Moving Device @AirMovingDevice

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…

JP Kleinhans @JPKleinhans

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!

Xifan Yang 杨希璠 @yangxifan

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."

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Mule @FoolAllTheTime

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” 😂

Dr Anton Howes @antonhowes

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.

Razven @RazvenHK

Taiwan: We live in a society.

Moss on Stone @MossonStone1

Chinese Pamphlets 1947-1954 - There is a wonderful collection of PRC pamphlets hosted on the CRL Digital Delivery System. dds.crl.edu/search/collect…

Zheng Ma @textangel

Broken Ink Landscape Sesshu Toyo (Muromachi Period 1420-1506) 雪舟等楊・破墨山水図