"In the trial footage, General Xu explains that he refused the order as a matter of individual conscience and professional judgment...[S]aying that a commander who carried out martial law poorly would go down as “a sinner in history.”" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/w...

"Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed...Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing...They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving"

Today, a lawyer for DHS suggested sending Guan Heng to Uganda, a country with close ties to China that is "more likely than not" to send him back, says Mr. Guan's lawyer. Due to increased public attention to the case, he has been scheduled for a 2nd hearing on Jan 12. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/u...

In this piece, I share lessons for Americans who are struggling with whether to protest Trump. Drawing from my years working with courageous Chinese activists, I argue that while acting on one’s moral convictions can be risky, it can also feel profoundly good. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Trump administration is threatening to deport a Chinese man who personally documented the Chinese government's massive detention system in Xinjiang. If forcibly returned to China, he faces the risk of state persecution for his invaluable & brave work. open.substack.com/pub/hrichina...

📣We’re hiring! There are two exciting new job opportunities in our foreign relations and economy and industry programs: 📌Analyst/Senior Analyst/Senior Economist (m/f/d) - Economy and Industry 📌Senior/Lead Analyst (m/f/d) Foreign Relations More info: merics.org/en/opportuni...

GOP: the Chinese Communist Party is evil because they harvest all your biometric and other data to empower social control. Also GOP:

Eye scans, licence plate readers, spyware: technology used to catch criminals and terrorists is being repurposed to fulfil Trump's pledge to deport 1mn undocumented migrants this year. Critics fear it’s the thin end of the authoritarian wedge. An #FTEdit thread on America’s new surveillance state 👇

The Trump administration that deported these Russians is the same government that this February condemned Thailand's forcible return of 40+ Uyghurs to China, where they would face the risk of "persecution, forced labor, and torture."

This is the Tufts PhD student who seized by masked agents on the street and jailed for two months because she wrote an op-ed calling for the school to divest from Israel.

A few thoughts on the new US national security strategy that was released today. 🧵 www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

Trump suggests Khashoggi had it coming: "You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest."

Excited for the launch of @drdavidtobin.bsky.social’s International Network for Critical China Studies (INCCS)! Now more than ever there’s a need for rigorous, reflective, critically-informed research on China. INCCS’s mission to avoid clunky, knee-jerk commentary is refreshing & desperately needed

worth applying to politics as well. when you're criticizing an action people take "taking the better action next time" is only one of the alternatives people will consider, and worth remembering that "not bothering at all" is another.

I legitimately think this article misses the mark, because Canadians are not avoiding travel out of some principled boycott of the USA over tariffs. Canadians who are avoiding the USA are seeing images of masked government thugs kidnapping people and teargassing children.

In a 2005 interview, the actor said that in his twenties, he was carrying the load of "everyone's masterpieces." He worked closely with directors including Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi. n.pr/4o3J8Xm

RIP legendary Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai. Star of Kurosawa's Kagemusha, Ran, many other classics. He was 92. news.yahoo.co.jp/pickup/6558551

Two things can be true: this signals impunity for TNR and that's bad and makes people less safe, and the existing levers of accountability punish on low-level folks instead of getting to the source of the problem www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Love poetry, human rights, & kitties? Check out Sharon Hom's Substack: substack.com/@talkingcat88 Sharon (fmr exec dir of Human Rights in China) is a brilliant mind & a wonderful soul. I've learned so much from her over the years. Come for the poetry, stay for the updates about her cats!

Researchers at the Citizen Lab and director @rondeibert.bsky.social sign open letter to the Canadian Minister of AI and Minister of Industry rejecting the “National Sprint” on AI strategy. Read it here: bccla.org/policy-submi...

So many harms have already emerged from reckless and oppressive uses of AI, with such wide-ranging & far-reaching consequences, to so many groups of people, that it seems almost impossible to document them all. But we tried, in this open letter to Minister Solomon: bccla.org/policy-submi... (1/x)

PEN Canada joins 43 organizations and 123 individuals in open letter opposing “National Sprint” consultation on AI strategy, which proposed a mere thirty-day window on short notice. pencanada.ca/news/open-le...

Please take this for what it is. Rhetoric to delegitimize the political opposition as an existential threat to create the conditions for the Ruling Party to deny the opposition the ability to take control of Congress pursuant to genuine election outcomes in 2026.

Canada budget update: A $2.7bn cut to international assistance over 5 years, or about 10-12% of the budget. Particularly focusing on global health, which is worrying because it's a core Canadian priority Not sure we need a resurgence of polio on top of everything, but what do I know

What I'm looking for in the Canadian federal budget: Development - Canada's budget for international stuff is complex. There's the International Assistance Envelope, OECD-measured ODA, plus stuff that falls under Canada's own Act. Plus provincial spending. They all overlap

Amid many a silly “free speech” panic, here is a genuinely chilling case … Sheffield Hallam professor accuses the institution of negotiating “directly with a foreign intelligence service to trade my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Along with 160+ civil society orgs & individuals, I signed this open letter that raises serious concerns about the Canadian government's proposed AI strategy. With all of the harms associated with AI-based technologies, greater public consultation is needed. bccla.org/policy-submi...

This sounds like the Chinese model of drug detention, which combines compulsory treatment, social isolation, and forced labour. The fact that authoritarians in the US & China increasingly resemble one another no longer surprises me.

NEW: Trump has announced that the US will admit the lowest level of refugees ever at 7,500 in FY 2026. The US will only be admitting as refugees White people from South Africa and "victims of illegal or unjust discrimination," which leaked memos suggest means far-right Europeans.

Ford just put every renter in Ontario into an even more precarious position. This is a clear and present danger to the 1.7 million renters in Ontario.

Trump has functionally killed America's international broadcasting apparatus. Russia and China are making up the difference. if we still care about democracy and liberalism abroad, countries like Canada need to step up. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Good lord, this is beyond the worst thing I could have imagined. If you'd told me "Trump will seek to have refugee eligibility explicitly limited to AfD voters, white South African farmers and organized racists -- " even I would have thought it hyperbole. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

“The proposals would transform a program aimed at helping the most vulnerable people in the world into one that gives preference to mostly white people who say they are being persecuted.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

Absolutely despicable.

Yeah this is my drum that I bang but I have to keep saying it: counter-TNR policies that leave out migration policy are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that most TNR entails host state cooperation, and “harder” migration systems make cooperation more likely

The lesson of the Trump era is to stick with your principles. He’s coming for you anyway, whether you do or not, so you might as well stick to your principles so people don’t laugh at you afterward and you can look yourself in the mirror.

1/ NEW REPORT: “We Say You Want a Revolution” - An AI-Enabled Influence Operation Aimed at Overthrowing the Iranian Regime. We call it PRISONBREAK. Keep reading to find out why. THREAD 🧵

NEW REPORT: We uncovered a coordinated network of fake X profiles that is spreading AI-generated content to induce revolt in #Iran. We call this network “PRISONBREAK”. Read the report 👉 citizenlab.ca/2025/10/ai-e...

I wanted to share some of the sources and inspirations for my new @jodemocracy.bsky.social essay this week on transnational repression. Like with anything, there are citations but then there's also stuff that doesn't make it into the piece www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the...

For the 100th time: Republicans who were China's loudest critics are now cheerleaders for an American surveillance state. These people have no principled concern for human rights. They are happy for the state to silence, detain & disappear its foes, so long as the state in question is their own.

New today: my essay in @jodemocracy.bsky.social on The Golden Age of Transnational Repression: www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the...

On Orange Shirt Day, I want to share a painting by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, "Indian Residential School, Leaving the Shallow Graves and Going Home." As Yuxweluptun has said, "This country has to carry the burden of what it did to us, as a nation. It has to be accountable for what it did."

“After his 60 years of engagement with China, Cohen says it saddens him to see the country going down the road of dictatorship. ‘Of course I feel terribly sad, terribly angry. I feel I have to do everything I can to increase public understanding of what’s about to take place. I have an obligation.’”

Sad news and a real loss for the field of China studies. Fortunately there are many people who, inspired by his work, will continue to build bridges between China and the West and advocate for the cause of human rights in China.

@djinnandtonic.bsky.social sticker spotted on H Street in Washington, D.C.

A chilling piece on how transnational repression impacts students in Canada, with quotes from me.

I recently appeared on "Activists of Tech" to discuss the rise of technofascism, how fascists use new technologies to build vicious and backwards-looking societies, the similarity of autocrats in the United States and China, & the need for solidarity. 1/2 rss.com/podcasts/act...