An under-appreciated benefit of the USB port: it bypasses the need for a plug adaptor in foreign countries. 👍🏻

“死缓” means ‘death penalty with a reprieve’, but a literal translation makes it look like CCTV has posted “Chen Yan, die slowly!”, like a North Korean news report might 😂

Sorry, but are we meant to think staged “Messianic leader surrounded by sycophants awkwardly feigning affection and trying to touch the hem of his garments” style propaganda is good? Is that the message here?

Retired Chinese people when the local coffee shop closes: Hmm, maybe I should have bought at least one drink over the years I used to sit inside it all day for free. (Not)

Attention is always on Uyghurs and Tibetans, but there are 55 minorities in 🇨🇳 and many of them are seeing language decline. I know a Zhuang woman who can’t speak Zhuang and recently met several Miao people who don’t know their language. Manchu is all but extinct. Why do these never get talked about?

Yikes. A news story that exposes not one but three troubling issues: 1, toxic substances being discarded in public; 2, hospitals refusing to help people in need; 3, unregulated sales of toxic substances on the Internet. 🤦‍♂️ mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vKMGMDRW0N...

A lot of people upset about the killing of Charlie Kirk are busy identifying co-conspirators based on nothing but furtive eye glances and baseball cap adjustments in the news footage. So their reaction to a murder is to help get other innocent people murdered in retaliation. Makes sense.

X is exactly how I expected it to be this morning, lol. Insults, squabbles, hypocrisy and conspiracy theories. Nothing changes.

Woke up to see that MAGA has found its Horst Wessel.

Why does everything have to involve everyone now? So a woman got mad at a guy because she didn’t get a baseball. In the old days that would have been between him and her. You don’t have to wade in.

This is your view through your sniper rifle. You get one shot before the other two are rushed to safety. Who’s your target? 😏

Not content with removing term limits, Xi is now pursuing immortality so he can rule forever. 😂 😱

Hard to reconcile China releasing thousands of doves in the name of peace with kids watching this at school and my kid coming home to tell me they did army drills and played rifle games at school today. Mixed messaging to say the least.

What wound you think if schools in your country cancelled classes so the kids could watch a military parade and listen to speeches by the Dear Leader? It’s happening today in China, from Grade 1 up. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if kindergartens are showing it too.

A new school year, but Xi Jinping Thought remains on the curriculum.

I sense there has been a silent edict to more strictly enforce keeping children away from religion recently. Twice at different temples in different cities my kid has been told to get out of the worship halls. Not even allowed to look as a tourist. Also seen more signs like 禁止未成年人进入 or 未成年人不得参加宗教活动.

Just been to my friend’s dad’s compound in south Jiading. Christ. I hope he doesn’t pay a management fee because no maintenance is being done. 🐈 and 🐕 shit everywhere. Paint peeling. 🌳 overgrown. 🗑️ overflowing and stinking. Potholes in the road. Paving slabs missing. The other side of Shanghai.

Spoke to two other Miao people who also can’t speak their native language. One was a woman in her 40s, the other a young man in his early 20s who couldn’t even tell me how to say ‘hello’. “My parents didn’t teach me.” I asked “Don’t you learn it at school?”, knowing the answer ofc, and he said no.

My tour guide on holiday is a Miao woman. She was impressed by my kid’s multilingualism. “Surely Miao kids are bilingual?” my wife asked. “No, kids rarely speak their minority languages these days, only Mandarin.” She wasn’t being political about it, just casually said it like it should be obvious.

In 2012 when foreign media was regularly reporting on China’s poor air quality, China used to get upset about the negativity. It even banned a documentary about smog in 2015 called ‘Under the Dome’. Now it wants you to remember so it can make a positive comparison. Interesting to observe the shift.

I feel like a lot of westerners don’t realize that a lot of western reporting on 🇨🇳 actually originates in 🇨🇳, esp about social phenomena. I see people say “CNN lies!” or “BBC propaganda!” about stories that are basically translations of viral Chinese news. Shows how little people read Chinese media.

I can’t think of a more cringe title than this play on ‘Seven Years in Tibet’, a film that remains banned in China. 🙈 Btw, I assume Andy learnt Tibetan and did all his pre-approved interviews in it, given it’s the official language there and he always insists reporters speak the local language?

An earthquake that caused a tsunami and now a volcanic eruption in Russia? Putin has clearly lost the Mandate of Heaven and needs to go.

Jason Smith—comfortably one of the dumbest laowai propagandists out there—suddenly discovers he hates censorship after all. Begs the question why he goes to bat for a government that pretty much pioneered internet clampdowns then.

Not unique to Andy, but I really loathe the popular idea that “respect is earned”. It implies one party is superior and the lesser party has to win them over. Respect is not earned, it’s given by default. We begin from a position of mutual respect. It can be lost thereafter, but we start as equals.

Been hearing some family history tonight. Some I knew, but I’d never been told that my wife’s grandma committed suicide to “not waste food” so her kids could eat after her family were refused enough for everyone due to having once been petty landlords.

Continuing the tradition of all great hip-hop artists by, erm, happily complying with censorship demands from a government that’s not even his own. Stick it to ‘em, Xiangyu. You’re so brave. What’s next “Love the Police?”?

Is this diplomacy? 🤔

Am I the only one who finds it odd that major international news sites are giving headlines to this Coldplay/CEO cheating nonsense? Like … why? It’s not news. Its internet gossip that should have died within 24 hours. Is it just that it’s a story they can fill space with without needing journalists?

Two of the most hardcore Party faithful, who make pro-Party content for Party media, are apparently the “bravest” kids in media. Yeah, it takes so much courage to say exactly what you’ve been approved to say. Stick it to the man! 😂

Now that the UK plans to let 16-year olds vote, it’s going to be interesting to monitor TikTok for political content. That’s now a huge battleground. If there’s any truth to the fears about Beijing’s control over the app, China could now have big influence in UK elections.

I looked up this 1977 resolution and guess what? Andy lied. It doesn’t say that Pinyin must be used for “English”. It says that when Chinese place names are *Romanized*, Pinyin is the system to use, i.e. it was a decision to agree to use Pinyin over Wade-Giles to standardize Chinese place names.

This is actually an own goal, because why is the “central government” deciding how Uyghurs spell their own ethnonym? Surely that’s exactly the kind of low-stakes decision you can safely devolve to the supposedly “autonomous region” of Xinjiang?

Remember when Flight MU5735 mysteriously crashed in Guangxi in 2022 and the government didn’t release its findings about the cause and the belief was the pilot crashed it deliberately and Andy B agreed and tweeted the conspiracy theory all over X? No? Weird.

youtube.com/watch?v=sRz5... 【匿名中国】I’m trying something new. Many China stories just don’t get told. Not because they aren’t worth hearing, but because people are afraid of speaking out. So, I’d like to try to offer a platform through which people can anonymously tell their China stories well.

Gave my seat to a lady with a newborn just now and realized it’s been ages since I’ve done that. It’s wholly anecdotal, but I do feel like I don’t see many new mothers on Shanghai Metro these days, which chimes with what we hear about the birth rate. Ten years ago I was constantly giving up my seat.

FM spokesperson reposting a 2017 video of Xi telling the clapping sea lions around him to just work hard for a better life. The part where he told the villagers to buy fewer takeaway coffees and eat less avocado on toast was cut off.

I don’t agree with the quoted tweet—Muslims coexist with others in many places—but it’s funny Andy forgot the XJ crackdown was justified as a ‘War on Terror’ after violence by Uyghur Islamists against Han. Schrodinger’s 🇨🇳: where Uyghurs live in harmony with Han but also don’t til they’re made to.

I hadn’t realized City News Service was related to Shanghai Daily, but now Shine.cn redirects to CNS and it seems SD may be returning to its former role as a local paper with a focus on Shanghai news and lifestyle. I wonder how the bitchier and more toxic propagandists fit into the rebrand.

I really don’t understand people—especially foreigners—who insist that it’s straightforward to get VPNs in China. It’s not impossible, sure, but why pretend it’s no more complicated than ordering lunch on Eleme? Such a weird thing to lie about.

“People attracted by the useful connections, the benefits and the favouritism shown to Party members as the economy slows and job security weakens …”

LMAO. Andy pretending that he feels the altitude on the Tibet train but is “okay”. What a trooper. Did nobody tell him those trains are pressurized to mimic the pressure at sea level? He missed an opportunity for a bit of positive energy there. 😂

I’ve been wondering whether some of the world’s less legally minded governments might take advantage of the situation in the US to pick up regime opponents and take them back? It’d be so easy to scoop up a Uyghur or a Russian dissident disguised as an ICE abduction.

I’d happily see the fall of the Ayatollah’s regime so I’m definitely not on Iran’s side, but this rhetoric feels like when certain people told Ukraine to make peace after it was attacked. In this conflict, Iran was hit first. Don’t let Trump and Netanyahu gaslight you into forgetting the chronology.

Shot and chaser.

Anyone else remember when Trump’s followers liked him because he was going to keep the US out of foreign wars?

WW1 was morally ambiguous, with no clear goodie or baddie. WW2 was unequivocal: Nazis the baddies, Allies the goodies. WW3 is shaping up to be an all-baddies affair. Netanyahu and Trump vs Khamenei and Putin is a case of ‘I hope they all lose’.

Andy confusing rule BY law with rule OF law, again. I wonder if he’d feel the same if NZ passed a law criminalizing working for Chinese state media as a NZ national and retroactively applied it to him.

Ah, the now annual tradition of Andy Boreham posting about 8964 and deleting it a few hours later. He never learns. Maybe every June he tells himself, “This is the year I finally have enough credit in the bank with the party bosses to get away with it … surely?” 😂