If you visit Tiananmen Square in Beijing and make the wrong hand sign or take a photo that the guards feel is too edgy, you can be arrested.

🎯

I would like for national media outlets to start treating the rise of Islamophobia in Texas as the five-alarm fire that it so obviously is.

Look what I found: After USAID's Food for Peace program was moved to the USDA last year, Food for Peace seems to have stripped food aid from all Muslim-majority countries. To this amazing chart from the Council on Foreign Relations, I added a column showing the % of the population that is Muslim:

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA

And yet another thread from me debunking extremely compromised China influence research, this time from the National Association of Scholars, an ideologically hard-right organization.

Kudos to @bethanyallen.bsky.social for the public service. Serious researchers on "China influence" and "China human rights" should speak out against this kind of slop to protect the integrity of the space. Work like this makes all of us look bad to outsiders.

I increasingly find that my primary role in the "China influence" space these days is to debunk a lot of very, very poor quality "China influence" research reports that have been coming out.

The problem is that “I am often scared and angry about social change” does not inherently lend itself to interesting art. You can be as technically skilled as the greats, but art with nothing interesting to say is just a commodity.

The fundamentalist-modernist controversy never ended, and it sure looks like the Texas Senate race is gonna make what has often functioned as subtext between the Christian traditions just, like, context.

Bo French still narrowly ahead in the runnoff for Railroad Commission, a position he has vowed to use in his war against Islam.

Pleased to see that Anthropic's new policy paper on China cites my team's research as foundational evidence for the company's policy position. www.anthropic.com/research/202...

A Chinese military court issued suspended death sentences for corruption to Wei Fenghe and Li Shangfu, two former defense ministers, punctuating a broad purge of China’s armed forces that has ousted most of the high command. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

The new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy just casually slips in this little conspiracy theory here: justthenews.com/sites/defaul...

SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT 📢 We're pleased to announce that Richard Marles, Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Minister for Defence, will speak at the 2026 ASPI Defence Conference in Canberra on 25 June. Tickets are limited, secure your place now. 🎫 Register: bit.ly/4tFfPhn

Big news on the transnational repression beat: RightsCon, the world's biggest digital human rights conference, has been CANCELED just days before it was set to begin in Lusaka, Zambia. The government of Zambia — which signed an agreement with China on April 24 — canceled it:

In our latest episode, author @bethanyallen.bsky.social joined us to discuss China's authoritarian economic statecraft and the China-Australia trade war. Allen reflects on changes to China's geopolitical strategy post-pandemic amidst Australia's push to investigate the origins of COVID-19. (1/2)

The Democratic Party headquarters in Abilene, Texas— my hometown—has been vandalized in a targeted attack, according to local news KTXS. The attack appeared to target the party's support for the LGBTQ community, as Pride flags and related items were destroyed or removed. ktxs.com/news/local/t...

NEW from me: In MN, George Floyd-era faith networks have reignited after Renee Good's killing by ICE. They often partner w/others: last night, a church, brewery & bookstore hosted an event. If you showed up w/a whistle (to warn people of ICE), you got a free drink. religionnews.com/2026/01/11/i...

Big year for photos of clergy enduring pain while protesting ICE. · Rev. David Black, Chicago Sun-Times: chicago.suntimes.com/news/2025/10... · Rev. Jorge Bautista, SF Chron: www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti... · Rev. Hannah Kardon, Chicago Protest Photography: www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1...

Chen Zhi, the alleged ringleader of one of Asia’s largest scam conglomerates, was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China, the Cambodian government said Wednesday. www.wsj.com/world/asia/c...

My appreciation for the film Dr. Strangelove has grown over the years. Its subtitle, I now feel, has a lasting brilliance that never loses its relevance — "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb."

Wow — even China doesn't do this. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/t...

Chinese models are rapidly gaining global users through open-weight releases & easy API access. As I told The Washington Post, if we don’t understand how they’re built, we risk importing censorship & political control hidden inside the technology itself. www.washingtonpost.c...

We tested image understanding in English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. We found: • Much stricter censorship in Chinese • Strongest distortions on Tiananmen, Tibet, Falun Gong & Xinjiang • Some models quietly added pro-state framing even without refusing.

The results are staggering. Models routinely: ❌ refuse to answer ❌ erase key details ❌ repeat state narratives Here’s one example: a major Chinese LLM flat-out refuses to describe the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

China’s national AI-safety standard categorises 31 types of “unsafe” content — from terrorism and privacy breaches to… 🟥 criticism of the CCP 🟥 “Western ideology” 🟥 peaceful protest This is the logic shaping every model released in China.

Our new ASPI report 'The Party’s AI' is out now. It shows how China’s LLMs, vision models and “AI+” governance architecture are hard-coding censorship and control into the future of AI. www.aspi.org.au/repo...

Beijing Rules: China's Quest for Global Influence by @bethanyallen.bsky.social (2024) #AutumnReading

ASPI's exclusive new report, shared with the @theguardian.com, reveals that the number of scam centers operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021 Read the Guardian's on-the-ground reporting: www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

WOW. China is drilling for oil and gas inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone, a move that analysts believe is likely part of Beijing’s unilateral grab for disputed territory. Great scoop from @heldavidson.bsky.social and @thejamestownfdn.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

In this article about China's green tech revolution, the New York Times cites ASPI's Critical Technology Tracker and my colleague Dr. Jenny Wong-Leung: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I was today years old when I learned the final appendix to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense — the pamphlet that set fire to the Revolution — concludes with a firm rejection of “mingling religion with politics.” The context is he’s fighting with Quakers he says aren’t Quakers, but he doesn’t mince words.

If the State Department doesn't renew funding for Freedom House's China Dissent Monitor, the world will lose an entire category of knowledge about how people in China are actually experiencing life under CCP governance. Read my latest: www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-last-pub...

"Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intel Cmte., led by … Marco Rubio."

Taiwan: I've finally discovered a country where everyone else apologizes to everyone else almost as much as I do, for non-infractions such as dropping a straw in front of a stranger and apologizing because now you have to stoop down in front of them to pick it up.

NEW: A ChinaFile investigation into China's powerful, but leaky, internet censorship system at locknet.chinafile.com 1/21

There's a family in the coffee shop I'm at who are alternating between Farsi and German. The fact that I understand both these languages has basically never been useful in my career, but it does make me an A+ eavesdropper lol

Michele Bachmann says Christians should be thrilled about the Israel/Iran war: "We are living in the times that the Bible said that the prophets longed to see. The prophets of the Bible wanted to be alive now!"

Wow, @columbiagr.bsky.social is keeping up its tradition of eye catching covers. I’ve loved the ones for my books with them and just saw the one they have for a forthcoming CGR that I can’t wait to read (by a writer I admire & on a topic of interest to me) globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-ro...

It is increasingly clear that drones — from reconnaissance UAVs to long-range loitering missiles to uncrewed subs — are a fact of modern warfare. Yet as it stare down the possibility of imminent Chinese invasion, Taiwan is struggling to build its own drone capability. www.wired.com/story/taiwan...

"toward"

AP: New Zealand has halted millions of dollars in funding to the Cook Islands over the “breadth and content” of agreements the smaller Pacific nation made with China, officials from the New Zealand foreign minister’s office has said www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

China tells its citizens in Israel to evacuate. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

"Protecting the borders from espionage is essential. It’s something else to deny students because they are Chinese and hope to pursue a STEM degree in the United States." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/b...

Today @financialtimes.com has featured my team's latest research. Liverpool's China venture has extensive and close ties to sanctioned Russian and Chinese entities, including a new "China-Russia cooperation center," and partnerships with Chinese semiconductor groups. www.ft.com/content/476d...

2. For the unfamiliar, here's a primer on Wilson, a rising star on the right who co-founded a denominations whose members include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. religionnews.com/2024/05/31/t...