🙏 💚

Sad story. Unfortunately young Chinese don't necessarily realise how dangerous dissent can be until something like this happens. Except, that is, if they are Tibetans or Uyghurs, in which case they know full well. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

New Shaun Rein diatribe on China's greatness dropped. This is the shills' new favourite talking point, that China has gone from lawless hellhole to super-safe utopia in 10 years. In fact, couriers would also leave packages unattended in front of my door 10 years ago, and no one would take them.

Shaun Rein's in full gear with his spiel today. Apart from the ridiculousness of equating human rights with stuff being cheap, the "really really nice" Shanghai hotel for $71 a night would probably cost half of that in Bangkok or Saigon. Most of SE Asia is better value for tourists than China.

My experience corroborates this graph. Levels of engagement on this site have really fallen through the floor. It's like everyone's given up on BlueSky. It was a nice idea, but it's not taking off. I hope I'm wrong.

Speaking to an Indonesian friend, I've just figured out this is a misunderstanding. "Shalom" is considered to be a Christian greeting in Indonesia, and it's sometimes used as a part of a series of greetings that represent the country's different religions.

Nice to see the Muslim leader of a major Muslim-majority country end a speech at the UN with Shalom. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

He points to how EU members’ exports to China now don’t even amount to those to Poland, a nation with a gross domestic product less than 5% of China’s — roughly the economic size of the southwestern province of Sichuan….“ www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Would be nice to see. jakartaglobe.id/news/indones...

The AQI readings for Bangkok make no sense. Almost 5000 in one location, around 50-100 in others, but then it's below 10 in quite a number of others. So is it polluted or not?

New wave of WWII films in China makes the country less safe for Japanese expats and visitors.

The youth protest movement spreading across South and Southeast Asia has reached East Timor as well. www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/timor-l...

China's "fengqiao model" of self-policing by communities is being exported to the Solomon Islands, a country which shifted its diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the PRC in 2019. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Notorious Chinese ultra-nationalist Carl Zha, who lives in Bali, finds out that trying to use China's digital payment platforms as a tourist with a foreign bank card remains troublesome.

There is some nastiness here on Bluesky, as you'd expect on a social media platform. But way, way less than there is or ever was on Twitter. By comparison, it all seems incredibly tame and polite, even boring. I don't see the mad frenzy of progressives denouncing each other that he's describing.

A good and honest article about what it's like to be a mixed-race young person in China today, including some discussion of how xenophobic China became during the pandemic. madeinchinajournal.com/2025/09/09/f...

Recent trend: apologists (whose ranks Angelica Oung has sadly joined) are claiming that China just a few years ago was a terribly dangerous country, full of crime, violence and a complete lack of trust, but in the space of a few years it has become completely safe and a paradise of social cohesion.

I just read my morning news, and god what a punch to the gut it was! Charlie Kirk's shooting, Poland "closer to war than at any time since WW2"... Everything just seems to be spiralling out of control. And no, it wasn't always like this.

You want to start a revolution in today's world? Ban social media. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

This comic, which appeared yesterday in Italian newspaper La Stampa, makes fun of left-wing politician and former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema for attending Beijing's military parade. The caption refers to the Pekingese dog breed.

Meanwhile in Italy there's controversy over Massimo D'Alema, former Italian Prime Minister in 1998-2000, attending Beijing's military parade. He was the only Italian politician to do so. ae.lapresse.it/politics-ae/...

Even Bali is seeing serious rioting, with 2 injured and 138 detained up to now. The whole of Indonesia is aflame, and Prabowo has had to cancel his attendance in China's parade. This is big stuff, but as usual Indonesia flies under the Western media's radar. www.cnnindonesia.com/nasional/202...

This probably deserves some attention: "The attack on the hydropower dam, which produces electricity, released 500 litres (132 gallons) of water a second for four hours until the incident was detected and stopped." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

The inventor and main representative of "MAGA communism" just can't contain his excitement at the thought of Chinese hegemony.

"Michael Pettis, a 66-year-old American who teaches finance at Peking University, seems an unlikely poster boy for “Trumponomics”." gabriel965.substack.com/p/michael-pe...

Here we go again. Thank goodness the woman survived.

Some news on the Chikungunya outbreak in Foshan. "If the nucleic acid test is positive, hospitalization and treatment are required". For those of us who were in China during 2020-22, these words bring ominous flashbacks. Let's hope for the best. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gDW-c602RY...

This assistant professor at Cambridge has been making waves on the other site with his apologia for China's political system. Apparently making China's GDP grow by any means necessary means they are "leading poverty reduction efforts" and we should all get down on our knees and thank them.

The Guardian's UK edition puts the tragic mass shooting in New York on its front page. Absolutely no mention anywhere of the equally tragic mass shooting in a market in Bangkok, in which five people were killed. And yet Bangkok is a cosmopolitan global hub and plenty of Brits live there.

I find it curious how visitors to China will wax lyrical about how clean Chinese cities are. They've improved a lot over the past 10-15 years, but if you live in Beijing the last thing you think is that you live in a city with immaculate streets.

Beijing slapped sanctions on @merics.bsky.social in the hope of undermining its influence with German & EU policymakers. It achieved precisely the opposite. Allowing @mikkohuotari.bsky.social to spend time in Beijing is an acknowledgment of the failure of this approach. www.scmp.com/news/china/d...

I think what this kind of prediction ignores is that a Japan with 1.4 billion people would be the world's biggest superpower, by quite a margin.

This has become my most popular ever post on BlueSky, by quite a distance. Funny how these things go.

The professional apologists are still banging on about whether to use CPC or CCP. The best part is that in China absolutely no one cares. But it's a great distraction from more important issues, as well as a loyalty test.

82 year-old Chilean who'd lived in the US for almost 40 years went to get his green card replaced and was deported to Guatemala. The family spent a week believing he was dead. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I will not rest until this lie is undone @newsweek.com

Recently there are a lot of these fake quotes by Xi Jinping (or in this case just "China") circulating on social media, saying aggressively anti-Western things he's never actually said. Most of those who comment on these posts appear to believe they're genuine.

Was in this beach bar in Ko Samet yesterday, and they displayed the Israeli and Palestinians flags right next to each other in between all the other national flags. It was nice to see, actually.

I visited Osh in 2016 and saw the huge statue of Lenin there, the tallest in Central Asia (pics below are my own). Now it's been taken down! www.bbc.com/news/article...

Saw two giant monitor lizards making love in the stream outside my compound in Bangkok this morning.

Thread on the Princeton Press' trip to Xinjiang. What strikes me is that the PRC don't need to be "desperate" to whitewash their policies in Xinjiang, since it's mostly fallen off the radar anyway. They'd do best not to bring attention to it, but they just can't help themselves x.com/JimMillward/...

To be fair, the only source for these quotes is the Chinese media. We can only hope her genuine comments were more nuanced - although joining any kind of organised tour of Xinjiang was a serious miscalculation.

Me and a friend just tried playing Settlers of Catan with ChatGPT as the third player. The chatbot started off weakly, misreading the board and misunderstanding the rules. But as we went along and patiently explained things, its decisions started getting better and better.

This is obviously a great move, but from a European perspective the odd thing is that officially "communist" countries don't offer free education in the first place. Also true for China, where the first 9 years of education were made free and compulsory only in 2006. e.vnexpress.net/news/news/ed...

It's funny how Graham Allison's "Thucydides's trap" take on US-China relations is really appreciated in China. I think it's because it presents the clash as a "natural" result of power relations, with no reference to different values or political systems.

I watched the screening of a documentary about Cheng Lei today, and then there was a Q&A session with her (she was on video call from her home in Australia). I asked how she felt about the Chinese system before she was detained, when she was working as a reporter in Chinese state media.

While the world's attention is elsewhere, this is still going on. More than 20 million people are in need of food aid across Sudan, and parts of the country are suffering famine. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

So Vietnam, run by a Communist Party and often seen as extremely nationalistic, has a clear pathway towards citizenship for foreigners married to Vietnamese or who have relatives there, and it's now been made much easier as well. e.vnexpress.net/news/news/fo...

Apart from the false equivalency and general stupidity of this tweet (which got thousands of likes), best estimates are that only around half of Mongols in China still speak their language. There used to be bilingual schools for Mongols, but since 2023 all education is in Mandarin alone.