Just started reading Louisa Lim’s « Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong»: « The police, instead of being guarantors of security, were behaving like violent thugs… . Far from protecting reporters as civilians, the police were singling [journalists] out for attack. » Trump=PRC

Americans should read this book. It's eerily relevant. Indelible City by Louisa Lim

Everyone has their favorite historical parallels to the rising authoritarianism right now in America. The one I find myself looking to most is Hong Kong/China. Particularly personified by two excellent books from journalist @louisalim.bsky.social

Labor Day afternoon cappuccino and a book. The way it should be.

What a list to be in! Thank you @georgiarybanks.bsky.social

Amazing authors supported YOU MUST TAKE PART IN REVOLUTION by providing praise which appeared on the back cover (known as blurbs). We want to thank each of them, starting with @louisalim.bsky.social! Thank you Louisa — it meant the world to us to get your thumbs up!

Session 3: @sophtree.bsky.social, @louisalim.bsky.social & @maxinebenebaclarke.bsky.social about resistance, literature as power & literature as activism. #StellaDayOut

Looking forward to one of the best literary events of the year! 🥳 #StellaDayOut is happening this month & here in Melbourne, it's on 18th of Aug 2025 (Mon). Feat. @clairegcoleman.bsky.social @maxinebenebaclarke.bsky.social @louisalim.bsky.social Melbourne – Stella share.google/gQyQRF7f7nOf...

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel in part for asking: Why did India avoid the mass famines that killed tens of millions in China? His answer: a free press. Journalists could expose suffering and shame governments into action. Silence and avoidance, by contrast, can be deadly.

Public media has been defunded. Your support keeps journalists on the ground, lifts unheard voices, and connects communities. Help us plan for what’s next. Make a monthly gift today. Stand with public media: n.pr/458sOhq

A great, and quietly shocking, episode of @littleredpodcast.bsky.social. @louisalim.bsky.social, @graemeksmith.bsky.social @wingkuang.bsky.social

#China: Today, Sebastien Lai, son of #HongKong writer and media publisher #JimmyLai, addressed the UN Human Rights Council as a representative of PEN International and called for his father's release. Watch his statement here🔽

Nature reports that the National Science Foundation has stopped awarding new grants and allotting funds to existing ones. All of them. @colincarlson.bsky.social says that unless the freeze is lifted, it “is going to destroy people's labs.” 2/10 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

On April 15, 27-year-old Mei Shilin (梅世林) put up three pro-democracy banners on an overpass in China’s southwestern Sichuan province. Authorities reportedly detained Mei soon afterward, and his current whereabouts are unknown.

Periodic reminder and proof that Hong Kong is NOT part of the People's Republic of Amnesia. (Cc. @louisalim.bsky.social)

I was at HKU yesterday and this is what the “democracy wall” looks like now. It has the same name. And cameras though. But nothing else

The piece you didn't know you needed to read.

From interview of Lee Bollinger, 1st Amendment scholar who served as dean of @UMichLaw, president of @UMich, and president of Columbia University. www.chronicle.com/article/were...

More than BTW, I want so much for Hong Kong to not become part of the People's Republic of Amnesia. And believe it still isn't. With regards to the Tiananmen Square Massacre and also the events that @louisalim.bsky.social wrote about in her "Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong".

This is the most right wing newspaper in the UK. Extraordinary.

Just thinking about when the Atlanta shootings happened and Asian American journalists were told they were too biased to cover it. Anyhow, there's many reasons that I helped start an Asian American magazine, but telling our stories on our own terms is one of them.

Okay... we feel like we say this every week but *a lot* of stuff happened. Let's break it down, starting with @brbarrett.bsky.social on why the DOGE takeover is worse than you think... (sorry, but you gotta read this one.)

Zelensky has now responded to his Oval Office meeting with this series of tweeted thanks to world leaders reaching out in consolation.

From @louisalim.bsky.social's "Indelible City": "At the end of July, ...local triads in Yuen Long... ran amok inside a subway station... [D]ressed in white T-shirts, [they] were looking for black-clad protestors but ended up beating anyone in their path. The police did not arrive for 35 minutes..."

NYT: #Trump’s New Crackdown on #China Is Just Beginning, with a clamp down on Chinese investment & access to technology. But the wild card may be the president himself. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/u...

A viral image on Reddit and TikTok seen in London 👍

Leiden University Libraries established the Leiden Chinese Queer Collection, to collect, preserve, and make accessible primary source material and scholarship on the Chinese queer experience, and to facilitate collaboration between academics, activists, and archivists. See edu.nl/qyewc for details.

Awful: Internal USAID memo instructs employees to refrain from talking to the media about cuts in assistance to the most vulnerable or they may get fired, WaPo reports. Trumpworld knows this is a big political problem for them. Keep the focus on it. New piece: newrepublic.com/article/1915...

@louisalim.bsky.social belated Xmas present exchange means I have some reading to do

Another thing we need to do: grow our newsletter subscribers! It costs $0 to sign up but helps us a ton. Plus, you get curated, fact-checked, algorithm-free news. A win-win. 51st.news/signup

The folks overseeing the General Services Administration have disabled the spoon emoji on its videoconferencing platform because employees were using the symbol yesterday to mock the Elon Musk-influenced "Fork in the Road" resignation offer. Goodnight 🥄.

“For all practical purposes, I’d call that a coup”: senator Ron Wyden

NEW: After consulting former Treasury staff, the Progressive Change Institute just released a memo outlining the worst case scenarios of Musk's hostile takeover. This is nothing more than an economic coup.

Here's a sneak peak from our upcoming episode to be released this week. Historian @tristangbrown.bsky.social discusses how the Qing dynasty used feng shui to maintain peace and legitimacy.

The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?

These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

And you thought the rest of the news was bad

Elon Musk's goal seems to amount to a coup over the US administrative state; Musk said he "deleted" the Direct File tax department, but that may not be true (Elizabeth Lopatto/The Verge) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

The Pentagon is evicting the New York Times, NPR and NBC news from their long-held office space and replacing them with organizations such as One America News and Breitbart. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

Follow our Little Red Podcast starter pack here on BlueSky with our guests from over 100 episodes. go.bsky.app/SrcvmU3

Nvidia’s latest AI trick makes your crappy webcam microphone sound practically professional. Details here: www.theverge.com/news/603518/...

New episode of the Little Red Podcast!!

How to start the Year of the Snake with the best brains on China beyond the Beijing beltway, in one handy starter pack go.bsky.app/SrcvmU3

I edit this podcast about China and it is a privilege.

Here’s the equivalent of a @bsky.app hongbao: a @littleredpodcast.bsky.social starter pack of 100 plus eps of China experts! Boost your China knowledge by adding them all