Under the Trump administration, many NEH programs have been ended, 2/3 of the staff along with the scholarly council fired, and most of the money that has been given out as noncompetitive awards given to handpicked recipients... 🗃️

MAGA’s ongoing war on academic freedom, reflected in headlines from the last 24 hours.

This is academic censorship, full stop.

Delighted that our Decolonizing Chinese History Roundtable is now available in Chinese translation as a book! Thanks to the wonderful team at Uli books and for my brilliant co-authors @jimmillward.bsky.social @catielila.bsky.social Taomo Zhou, and James Evans www.bookrep.com.tw?md=gwindex&c...

Super excited to see #Decolonzing Chinese History published in Taiwan! Congratulations @dgtam86.bsky.social @catielila.bsky.social!!

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

It's impossible to know exactly how this decision was made right now, but this is both a sad loss for Texas students and another piece of evidence that critical gender and racial analysis at universities is precarious, dangerous, and becoming more so every day. www.star-telegram.com/news/local/e...

No Kings-San. Antonio, TX

Ideas for the @madeinchinajournal.com piece were partly spurred by an earlier conversation I had with @dgtam86.bsky.social and Abigail Coplin on gender and STEM in China, hosted by @ncuscr.bsky.social on the 30th anniversary of the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in fall 1995:

Some thoughts on Zhongyuan Mandarin - from someone growing up internalizing the stigma associated with our native dialect chenchenzhang.net/2025/10/05/s...

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by deporting noncitizen student activists. nyti.ms/4mG1pck

i am seriously begging democrats to bring the same smoke to this story that they brought to jimmy kimmel being indefinitely suspended

“I’m emotionally shellshocked right now,” said one professor in the Texas Tech system. “What does it say about academic freedom? It says we don’t have it.” The professor spoke by phone from the inside of a car to avoid being overheard by colleagues. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

All my best to this FEMA employee, and may they succeed in their mission:

"Faculty are afraid to carry out their jobs faithfully in what they view to be your interest, and there is little evidence that the administration will shield them from outside pressures. Missing in this equation is you. What kind of education do you want?" thebatt.com/news/anonymo...

A mensch. I learned so much from him, and I feel honored too the three of us were able to have that conversation, and Jerry lives on in this as in countless projects, writings, students, cases.

En route from Beijing, and I see the news that Professor Cohen has passed away. Still teach his enduring study History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, Myth -and thinking back on how much I learned from Paul over many informal chats and gatherings in Cambridge. Safe travels, laoshi.

RIP to Jerome Cohen, a truly inspiration and fascinating longtime China scholar. I'm genuinely honored I got the opportunity to chat with him once alongside @johndelury.bsky.social about American Sinology in the Cold War. www.ncuscr.org/event/agents...

"the most important anticolonial intellectuals may not use the language of decolonization and may not be in unis, but on the streets, with social movements, and in prison" Alpa Shah. not the state-affiliated think tanks talking deco, not the deco big names talking multipolar civilizational order

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

My head is actually spinning at how many current and future colleagues, both in the China field and beyond it, we are about to lose because of this

Now is the time to contact your employers and rally to protect vulnerable colleagues. The administration is demanding that any valid H1-B visa holders outside the U.S. (or their employers) pay $100,000 for them to reenter the country, as of Sunday. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I often talk about DC being an oral rather than a literate culture and this also applies to punditry in general: they base their opinions largely on what they've *heard* and on the vibes among their peers, not on what they've read or thought about

For Americans who want a play-by-play of what an authoritarian transition looks like in the 2020s, I strongly recommend catching up on what’s been happening in national security-era Hong Kong. One of the first shots fired in the ongoing crackdown was cancelling a comedy show for “insulting police.”

I think, every so often, about how the student protesters in South Korea figured out there was a finite supply of tear gas, and then staged retreating marches that caused police to burn off most of it, before the big "bring your auntie and kids" marches that ultimately toppled the dictatorship.

a key reason they see an opening for such a blatant speech crackdown is that they already did one to Palestinian and anti-genocide activists and it got enthusiastic bipartisan approval

The dumbness is part of the authoritarianism. They can pursue banana pants policies because they know they don’t have to be accountable. And the whimsical nature of law enforcement means no one knows where the red line is. If boobs can be weapons, anything you do can be construed as nefarious

I can tell you this is how it is in Hong Kong now. At least 2 million ppl supported the 2019 protests and the pro-democracy movement in general. The govt knows it can't possibly jail all of them so they make high profile examples of some while "patriots" make threatening phone calls to others.

Not a headline that can appear in an actual democracy. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

at the center of the efforts to destroy civil society in russia, hungary, georgia and elsewhere is the stigmatization, harassment, & criminalization of NGOs. that's what this is about, a full-on assault on democratic debate & freedoms. this is not hyperbole. it's right here.

So the enforcers of laws will take away your money and power even if you haven’t broken any laws?

One of the banners held up by protesters at Incheon International Airport

I thought this was a very cogent response, and was essentially what my kid said too (though not quite this eloquently!) From a younger friend:

idk if you've seen this south korean editorial that ran a few days ago. google translate version scorched my eyebrows www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion...

“This is a national humiliation,” said Hong Jeong-sik, 75. “This is not the way you treat your ally.” “I will never visit the United States again,” said Jeong Gwan-won, 32. (South Korea had agreed to make $350 billion in investments in the US.) Free link ⤵️ www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/w...

Universities must be bastions of open inquiry, not battlegrounds for partisan intimidation. Please sign & share.

this case was devised in a lab to reveal the hypocrisy of both the “free speech on campus” and the “cancel culture” grifters simultaneously

Pro-tip for faculty who are more trusting than me: any time anyone tells me to do something verbally, I always send an email to them right after saying "For my memory, just to recap our conversation a few minutes ago, you asked me to do X. Please let me know if I misunderstood." Paper👏trail👏ALWAYS!👏

🚨What has happened at Texas A&M this week should concern every Texan. Not only has the integrity of academic freedom come under fire, but the due process rights of a faculty member have been trampled at the urging of state politicians + the governor himself. www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

A lot to say about this, but one thing is that the Professor in question was a lecturer, and thus did not have tenure. The destruction of academic freedom is inextricably linked to the loss of worker protection in the university.

In my father's poli sci classroom in 1970s Taiwan, he would always call out the 'spy students' in the back: "Take good notes! Spicy bit!" The class would titter. Even the report-maker would look a bit abashed. In this A&M student's righteous "Dear Leader" invocation, there was no shame felt at all.

A professor at Texas A&M taught… something related to gender that offended a student, who secretly filmed herself objecting. That video is picked up by TX legislators, who demand her firing, and now the dean and dept head have been fired. www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

Everyone say hello to Tupi, a lil’ capybara baby at the San Antonio Zoo. 🥹

Only one of the smartest, most perceptive journalists ever to cover China. Snatch Shen Lu up quick. @shen-lu.bsky.social

"I’d never been so curious about another writer’s routines, habits, and time-management skills." Hua Hsu asks the question we all have: how does Rebecca/R.F. Kuang manage to do it all?!?

REMAKING THE EARTH, EXHAUSTING THE PEOPLE by Micah S. Muscolino @mmuscolino.bsky.social examines how Chinese state-led conservation transformed Gansu's landscape—and how rural communities bore the costs. Available now: uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295...

Michelle King on two accessible new books on Taiwan that, fittingly, treat its history as of great interest for its own sake lareviewofbooks.org/article/one-... ...read the essay along w/this lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-de... & this lareviewofbooks.org/article/move... work well as a Taiwan trilogy

Had a chat with Andy Liu and Yun Zhou about youth unemployment in China @ncuscr.bsky.social