The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet

Yi-ling Liu

Knopf

June 3, 2025

335 pages

ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0593491867

YI-LING LIU'S The Wall Dancers is a highly readable—borderline novelesque in its deft storytelling technique—account of five Chinese lives transformed by the internet and by their own courage in navigating it.

The author, a Hong Kong-born, US-educated journalist who built her career in Beijing, positioning her to write about China's internet with both intimacy and critical distance, has written a book that undermines the assumption that there are no secrets in the realm of China’s monolithic internet. Rather, Liu makes her case that the Chinese internet offers non-party-endorsed civic spaces for the marginalized via five Chinese: Ma Baoli, a gay cop turned dating app founder; Lü Pin, a feminist activist; Eric Liu, a Weibo censor; Chen Qiufan (Stanley Chan), a sci-fi writer; and Kafe Hu, a hip-hop pioneer.

What it takes—and here’s the book’s title and theme in a nutshell—as the author put it herself in a recent interview with Reuters, is the ability to operate in the mainstream and speak the language of authority. Liu adds, speaking of her subjects:

They could code-switch, they could wear many hats. They were creative and adaptable and knew how to identify leverage points for change.

They were, to take a saying that resurged in popularity with Chinese journalists in the 2000s, able to “dance in shackles” (带着铁链跳舞), or cleverly improvise within imposed boundaries.

A side note, a detail now far easier to dig up given the advances of AI, is that “Dancing in shackles” (帶著鐐銬跳舞1) appears to have had a previous time in the sun a century ago, when Wen Yiduo (闻一多), the modernist poet and scholar, argued in a 1926 essay that true poetic mastery lies in working creatively within constraints.

But the lineage barely matters. What counts is how aptly it describes Liu’s subjects: people who neither submit nor rebel, but find the gaps and test the limits, create civic spaces where there were none before.

Liu writes that, on returning to China, as she watched people constantly test and adapt to the shifting boundaries of the Great Firewall, she realized that some were particularly adept at pursuing expression and making connections without fully escaping the system or directly confronting it. As she put it in an interview with The Wire China: “I came to know the people who were really good at navigating this terrain as ‘wall dancers’, which is what ended up being the title of the book.”

The term matters because it resists easier labels. “Dissident” implies open confrontation; “netizen” is too neutral. Wall dancer captures something more pragmatic and more human — ingenuity under constraint, not heroic rebellion.

The early pages of the book inevitably coincide with the early days of the internet—the raw early days of Chinese internet access, when the technology itself was the crack in the wall. The internet as accidental liberator, before anyone with Party membership and clout had quite decided what to do about it.

In a particularly moving early scene, Liu writes:

The Internet begins in China as a place of discovery, filled with a sense of anarchic, joyful possibility. As a closeted policeman in the 1990s, when homosexuality was designated a mental disorder, Ma Baoli went to an Internet café, looked up the Chinese term for homosexual, and discovered a like-minded community. He read queer fiction, joined gay chat rooms, watched every gay film he could get his hands on, “sobbing over his takeout noodles,” and felt like “he was no longer alone.”

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Ma, in what is one of the book’s highlights, goes on to build out China’s biggest gay dating app after being forced to quit his day job as a cop.

Liu also introduces us to the feminist writer Lü Pin, who becomes obsessed with the case of Deng Yujiao, a waitress who fell afoul of the authorities. Liu writes:

On May 10, 2009, Deng Yujiao, a twenty-one-year-old waitress in Badong County, Hubei [Province], was washing her clothes in the restroom of Dream Fantasy City, a karaoke and entertainment club where she worked, when two local officials walked in demanding “special services”—a euphemism for sex. Deng refused.

‘Aren’t you all the same? You’re a prostitute and you still want to have a good reputation?’ one of the officials taunted. He slapped her face with a wad of banknotes. ‘Don’t you want money? Would you believe if I am going to beat you to death with money today?’ When Deng tried to leave the room, he dragged her back, pushing her onto the sofa. Unable to struggle out of his grip, she pulled out a fruit knife and stabbed the three-inch blade into his neck. As he lay dying, she called the police and turned herself in. After her arrest, she faced homicide charges.

In times past, the case would undoubtedly have been classified as an “internal” affair and have vanished from the public eye without trace—another inconvenient incident silently vanished. But in 2009 China’s internet was a lively town square in which a blogger could pick up a racy local story and possibly take it countrywide. In the Deng Yujiao case at least one blogger did just that—and at the moment when China had overtaken the US and had more internet users than any other country in the world; an estimated 338 million in mid 2009.

Within days it was a national cause, with internet voices demanding justice and turning their anger on the officials involved. How, does a local cadre walk around with that kind of cash? was one question, implying the omnipresent Chinese career-killer, corruption. The other was whether Deng had acted in self defense.

The clamor of voices did its job. In what can only be seen as a staggeringly unusual change of fortunes the murder charges were dropped. Deng was granted bail on grounds of self-defense.

Lü Pin watched it unfold and when she responded, it was with a different take. The online conversation had focused on corruption, she wrote, when the real issue was patriarchy: a systemic tolerance of sexual violence that allowed powerful men to prey on vulnerable women.

Her articles found a readership, but a narrow one—the same small circle of scholars and academics who already knew her work.

Frustrated with preaching to the same flock of academics, in September 2009—just two months after the Deng Yujiao case—Lü founded “Women’s Voices,” a digital magazine dedicated to covering women’s rights issues, sent out as an email newsletter distributed weekly as a Word doc to her friends and peers. The magazine’s purpose, she wrote in the first issue’s introduction, was to “popularize China’s feminist movement.”

She didn’t want to create a closed circle of elite experts. She wanted to create a collective movement of grassroots feminists. A reader suggested a name change: “Feminist Voices” rather than “Women’s Voices.” At first, she hesitated. The word “feminism,”（nüquanzhuyi, 女权主义, literally means “women-powerism,” a likely red flag to likely to antagonize China’s more reactionary male readers. How would ordinary readers respond?

Readership soared and Lü, propelled by the internet, was suddenly the publisher of the nation’s most influential feminist publication, and herself China’s most influential feminist activist.

This review hasn’t touched on any of the other three characters whose individual stories weave together as the chapters unfold: science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan; hip-hop pioneer Kafe Hu; and Eric Liu, a former content censor turned critic. But as the reader proceeds, it becomes clear that the trajectories of all five’s aspirations follow the same pattern. As the cracks in China’s internet start to close—or is it that the chains drag heavier?—they start being forced into compromises and the reader starts to wonder how Liu can maintain all the way to the book’s conclusion the determined optimism that has fueled her narrative so far.

The answer is she does and she doesn’t. Two of her subjects, one of them Lü, do the “run”—to borrow the Chinese internet slang for getting out of China—and are in the US. Chen Qiufan is a science fiction writer success story, president of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association.

What about Ma Baoli, the closeted gay cop?

He quit his job, divorced his wife and established China’s leading gay dating app. Liu writes:

When we last met in 2021, he was leading a team of eight hundred people out of a two-story glass-walled office, preparing to list the world’s largest gay dating app on NASDAQ. Today, he operates from a cluttered office the size of a two-bedroom apartment with a dozen friends, devising business strategies to sell jackets and snacks.

Liu reports that Ma still has “bigger ambitions.”

The author should be commended for not giving up on her subjects—indeed the show itself—but the critical reader is likely to feel compelled to respond that The Wall Dancers is arguably a book about an era that has passed, particularly as we enter a new era of AI assisted censorship. Liu herself, in her epilogue describes writing the book as “a race against disappearance.”

The remains of a more open internet were and still are being quietly removed.

As the book concludes, Liu is in New York, where she meets Susan, 27 and from Jiangsu Province. Susan’s last job was with an NGO in Shenzhen until the do-good community work was shuttered by the authorities. She now “freelances.” She describes New York as “a breath of fresh air” but plans to return to China, despite the challenges.

At Liu’s probing, Susan says she thinks that Chinese who decamp to the US become too pessimistic about there being space to work on passion projects in China. For Susan herself, China still calls to her: there’s work that needs to be done.

In her interview with Reuters, Liu says she wanted to avoid the tired old trope of monolithic China and “do something different by telling the story through people, because it kind of forces us out of those tropes and forces us to really see a society in the full complexity of an individual human life.”

Framed so, Liu’s book is a highly readable success. But on the question of achieving meaningful change in an AI-assisted surveillance state, The Wall Dancers offers us some past glories in the form of five interesting Chinese who were fortunate enough to find internet wormholes to new lives before the CCP did their “Chinese characteristics” act and made shopping discounts the major surprises on a repurposed Web.

Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy

Anne Stevenson-Yang

Bui Jones Books

June 3, 2024

144 pages

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1739424367

YET ANOTHER late-to-the-table-review, Anne Stevenson-Yang’s Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy should have appeared here in ChinaDiction last year. But, given the wide-ranging nature of the book—and within less than 150 pages—it was never going to claim the attention that bigger books with bolder themes do.

That’s a pity—and unfair. Wild Ride is not a book in search of a theme. It’s simply a book in which the theme comes most easily to the reader whose mode is set to “slow/thoughtful.”

Stevenson-Yang’s case is also hampered by the fact that she arguably saw the light too soon, selling her Beijing home in 2011, when she saw the writing on the property-market wall. The truth is that the writing was there—it just wasn’t to manifest itself as a pop for another 10 years. The miracle story—although not Stevenson-Yang’s—is how long Beijing kept the entire wobbly infrastructure steady for as long as it did.

Her core thesis about the bubble’s unsustainability—over-supply, debt-fueled speculation and illusory value in en-masse vacancies—proved prescient, but her timing was off by a decade due to government interventions, stimulus, and policy efforts to prop it up (e.g., easing credit cycles).

Arguably, such outcomes are all part of the “wild ride,” which returns us to that theme lurking in the background of Stevenson-Yang’s tick-off-the-decades history of post-Mao China.

How often was China’s rapid rise interpreted as an ideological shift? At times it was almost as if every time a Politburo cadre sneezed in Beijing, democracy, peace and prosperity for all was around the corner. Wild Ride’s great strength reposes in its ability to see through the absurdity of such thinking and unflinchingly view China as a country in which regime survival trumps everything else. Wild Ride offers clarity on the extent to which China’s political elite was rattled by the events of 1989, when offering a form of democracy with Chinese characteristics took precedence over everything else.

In hindsight, asked whether China’s dazzling rise was a genuine ideological shift or a temporary, pragmatic concession in the existential interests of survival by the party, the answer by now should be obvious, particularly as General Secretary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping digs in ever deeper with his self-reliant, tighten-your-belt world view.

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Overall, Wild Ride argues that China’s dizzying ascent wasn’t tainted by a drop of ideological zeal. What we’re witnessing now is the winding down stage, acknowledging the miraculous growth that preceded it and its inherent unsustainability when authoritarian impulses take the lead from market forces.

At the heart of Stevenson-Yang’s analysis is real estate. While Deng Xiaoping’s reforms welcomed foreign capital and technology, the decisive spark came in the 1990s under Zhu Rongji, premier from 1998 to 2003. Undertaking bold economic reforms, tackling corruption and steering China through the Asian financial crisis and negotiating the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, Zhu laid the foundations for China’s explosive economic growth and its integration into the global economy in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It’s a well known story now—the great feedback loop. Rising incomes meet repressed interest rates on savings. Local governments, starved by the tax system, turn to land sales and property-led development as their main revenue source. Through thousands of LGFVs backed by land collateral, authorities borrow enormous sums to construct roads, airports, high-speed rail, and, whatever else springs to mind.

The resulting credit boom—unparalleled elsewhere—drove double-digit GDP growth, generated massive household wealth via leverage, and created extraordinary fortunes for connected elites. Construction, speculation, and related sectors became the economy’s beating heart. But the model was brittle from the start, Stevenson-Yang argues—an “experiment” propped up by financial repression and state command rather than true market mechanisms.

Enter those infamous “ghost cities”—and with them, unfortunately, the non-ghostly debts. The 2008 global crisis prompted a stimulus that supercharged property further, and by the late 2010s the cracks were visible: unprofitable projects, price stagnation after 2019, tightened credit to developers, and a sharp drop in new home starts. The property collapse has since crippled local budgets and eroded consumer confidence.

Stevenson-Yang’s account is unflinching. It’s Wild Ride’s greatest strength: reform was never about political opening; it was a pragmatic bid for regime survival. As the writer puts it:

After Russia invaded Ukraine, analysts opined that China was building a new world order in competition with the US. None of these fears have been realized, yet two quite different constituencies internationally continue to stress the reality closest to their own interests: competitive, threatening China or admirable, cooperative China; one growing into a belligerent threat to world peace, the other encompassing a vast new market, which no foreign company can afford to ignore. Actually, neither view is accurate. The fear of China as a competitor is misplaced. But understanding China’s effects on the world economy and governance has only just begun.

The suggestion is that this isn’t about China triumphing globally—it’s about the corrosive demonstration effect. The world has now seen a large, poor country use authoritarian methods to become the second-largest economy, lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, and build world-class infrastructure, all while keeping the Party firmly in charge. That precedent is tough to unsee, especially when democracies struggle with infrastructure delays, inequality, polarization, or so-called short-termism.

Stevenson-Yang pairs this with skepticism: the “success” was partly illusory (built on debt, speculation, forced savings, environmental ruin, and suppression), and it’s now unraveling into stagnation and isolation, although such positions are debatable. The true fallout isn’t military conquest or ideological export—it’s the normalization of the idea that autocracy can deliver results worth the trade-offs in freedom and openness.

That’s what is hard to forget (and potentially destabilizing for global governance): autocracy can appear to “work” and “get things done” on a massive scale, at least for a while, without the liberal prerequisites that were for so long assumed essential. It’s the deeper, more enduring effect Stevenson-Yang is undoubtedly pointing toward.

That’s the one that outlasts the hype cycles of threat or opportunity—the framework of competition even. Its outcomes are unpredictable and reverberate long after people first become aware of them—often until they’re upon you.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

Dan Wang

W. W. Norton & Company

June 3, 2025

275 pages

ISBN-13‏: ‎978-1324106043

DAN WANG’S BREAKNECK is a book with two premises, but let’s get the easiest of them out of the way first because it risks becoming an annoying meme with limited utility.

It goes like this: Americans and Chinese are far more alike than they realize. That’s it. If only Americans learned to love engineering slightly more (see Premise 2 below) and the Chinese upped their lawyerly restraint, the two global superpowers might stop glaring at each other across the Pacific and start learning from each other.

They might even begin to realize—as Wang puts it on the first page of his book—that there are “no two peoples … more alike” than they are.

Shouldn’t that spark mutual curiosity, Wang wonders—and isn’t mutual curiosity exactly what the world needs right now?

Over to Wang:

The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble.

It’s rung a chime of hopeful optimism that has resonated, welcomed by rapturous critical praise and coveted book-of-the-year short-listings—notably the Financial Times, which shortlisted it as “Business Book of the Year.”

It didn’t win, and at the risk of engendering any ill will from the author, who’s a promising writer, it shouldn’t have. Breakneck is a fluidly written account of the author’s six or so years in China, with several borderline travelog digressions. Unfortunately, the book hinges on a conceit that the author has been living in an “engineering state,” and of all the many things China is, I’d argue that the engineering is a veneer—a veneer with heavy clout, shouting at you from urban sky-scapes and offering a plenitude of intra-China travel options, but a veneer all the same.

By comparison, the previously mentioned distraction of posited US-PRC affinities—no two people are more alike—is minor compared to the argument that a surfeit of engineering degrees has shaped China in ways that work to China’s advantage and our disadvantage. They’ve been building up and out, while we've been lawyering up and stymying high-speed rail and shiny urban commuter options with years of paperwork and all the NIMBY zeal we can muster..

To be fair, Wang, playing it cool—“just kidding” (wink, wink)—has subsequently described Breakneck’s intent to the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California as “playful and provocative.”

He may say that, but he gives every impression of genuinely believing that US “lawyerly society” could do with a nuts-and-bolts “engineering state” kick on the posterior, while the latter should keep its grubby fingers at a considered remove from the human soul, which won’t happen because talk of the soul alone is enough to warrant tea with the local constabulary, if not worse.

But Wang is clearly disturbed by the party’s ruthless overreach—in the name of progress and patriotic nationalism, for example—in his chapters on the country’s zero-Covid strategy and the One-Child policy.

He writes phlegmatically:

The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. The Communist Party envisions itself as a grand master, coordinating unified actions across state and society, able to launch strategic maneuvers beyond the comprehension of its citizens. Its philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals.

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It’s a statement that speaks to Breakneck’s overarching vulnerability, whispering, What if it’s something more than that? It is a communist party, after all—a communist party that bulldozers over anything that stands in its way and outright bans any expression of civil society, be that religion or even Marxist discussion groups.

There it is: what Wang celebrates as having achieved eye-popping engineering accomplishments the length and breadth of China is inseparable from the bulldozers and China’s top-down authoritarian system.

Rather than rushing in to label contemporary China as an “engineering state,” let’s cast our minds back to when the students of a backward, under-siege China took to the streets in support of Mr. Science.

The year was 1919. News had reached Beijing that the Western powers at Versailles had handed Germany’s Chinese concessions to Japan—a betrayal that laid bare the impotence of a nation that had not long before been the Celestial Empire, the global center of civilization.

Students poured into the streets, and in the ferment that followed, Chinese intellectuals groped for answers to the question, Why had China fallen so far behind, and was the answer, as Japan had already done, a concerted effort to embrace “foreign learning?”

Two rallying points emerged: Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. This was no fleeting outburst. The May Fourth Movement shook China to its core at the time and remains China's founding revolutionary moment – think 1776 for Americans, 1789 for the French – and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still claims to be its heir, even though the CCP was yet to have been even founded—for that momentous occasion look to Shanghai, July 1921.

That was a different China—a different world—and today, China's Youth Day is a public holiday that commemorates the May Fourth anniversary, and China rattles Taiwan on a near daily basis, leading to headlines like “China Ends Large-Scale Taiwan Blockade Drills as Xi Declares Reunification Unstoppable.”

Mr. Democracy was quietly buried in the 1920s, while Mr. Science—sans the Mr.—transformed into something its original champions wouldn't recognize—a claim to infallibility under a party that declares itself the embodiment of scientific truth.

On the 2019 centenary, Xi Jinping invoked its spirit with the words, "The May Fourth Movement gave birth to the great spirit centered on patriotism, progress, democracy and science, with patriotism at the core," relegating democracy and science to rhetorical puffery in the lead-up to what China really is today: a state with patriotism at the core. It may not roll off the tongue as the engineering state does, but it has the virtue of speaking to the truth.

This is the inheritance Dan Wang’s Breakneck fails to excavate. Wang offers a detailed account of China’s technological rise and how it’s organized around the “engineering mindset” of its technocratic elite. To be sure, it’s a seductive web: China succeeds because engineers solve problems at scale, and the party appears to have a well-oiled machine that facilitates engineering outreach.

But, if it is a machine—and one might argue it is—it’s clear that it’s there to render the authoritarian party structure it serves unassailable.

In this light, the now long forgotten Mr. Science is less historical background than animating mythology that still plays out today as a cog in the legitimizing operations of China’s national narrative.

“Scientific socialism” was always a claim to have discovered objective laws of history, putting Marxism on par with physics. The party doesn’t formulate hypotheses after all; what it does is to lay down scientifically “correct” lines. Why not call it science with Chinese characteristics?

When Xi Jinping speaks of technological self-reliance—and of course many other issues—he’s not making off-the-cuff references to industrial policy and regional water diversion projects. He’s drawing on a lineage of sorts that extends back over a century, tapping into something almost spiritual—science as national redemption. After all, Xi—and the compatriots still at his side—believes that science is a guiding force—so long as Xi himself remains science personified, the ultimate arbiter of where precisely correct can be situated.

And as for the engineers—they will be close by for as long as they’re trusted and useful—and they will continue to build things, as long as the money holds out.

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Mr. Science—reaching back again to 1919—also explains what Wang’s geographic cropping obscures. The Breakneck narrative requires a certain framing: Shenzhen, the gleaming high-speed rail, BYD factories, Huawei campuses. But travel high-speed rail across China and you’ll see the gaps from the comfort of your air-conditioned carriage: the villages literally riven by the finger of rail you’re traversing.

And those are just the villages you can see. The ones you can’t are probably countless, connected by pit-holed “old roads,” ferrying produce on ramshackle old trucks to county markets. Yes, such villages and towns are increasingly outliers—the last time I saw them was in 2018 over the course of two trips to Guizhou Province (much lighter reading than this review, I promise). China’s hard-scrabble rural regions have been slated for demolition for years, and the work of the hammers and the bulldozers continues apace. But they’re still out there, if you travel far enough that you’ve left the last tollroad off-ramp.

As for why they’re disappearing, it’s unlikely the CCP has the people’s wellbeing in mind. The usual arguments apply—rural uprisings have traditionally been a scourge of smug and settled dynastic hubris. Besides, China’s state-promoted urban agglomerations with all their at-the-door, 15-minute city conveniences are the perfect place to make a home—provided you can remember the number of the block you live in and what floor and provided you can adjust from rural make-do and find access to a city income.

The ramifications of such disruptive, wide-scale and enforced emigrant marches on the cities cannot simply be piled on the shoulders of a technocratic elite of engineers. Sure, China has an engineer-dominated leadership. The Hu-Wen Politburo Standing Committee was something like 80% engineers by training. Xi himself studied chemical engineering. And there’s a particular worldview that comes with that: problems are technical, solutions are systems, and with enough data and correct implementation, outcomes are controllable.

But the CCP takes the policy decisions it does—especially those that bear on the quality of life of those on the receiving end—because it can. It has science—which is nothing other than the absolute truth—and authority at its back. Things will be as they are ordained.

Mr. Science as authority rather than method explains the accountability Wang declines to demand of his China. When he confronts the one-child policy’s horrors—tens of millions of forced sterilizations and abortions, a catastrophically skewed gender ratio, a demographic time bomb now detonating—the framing suggests this is simply what engineers do. But this was technocratic hubris married to unchecked power—and calling itself science.

The same evasion applies to Covid-19. Five years on, we have discovered no natural reservoir or intermediate host for a virus that emerged remarkably well-adapted to human transmission right next to a laboratory conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

If Wang still clings to a natural origin for Covid, consider what his own thesis implies. Were China truly a nation where the scientific spirit ruled, the scientific method would demand that all viral-origin hypotheses be tested equally. They weren't. The engineers buried the evidence—and that’s not an aberration. That’s Mr. Science, otherwise known as the party, circling the wagons.

Wang has written a book that reveals his affection for China, his concern for the US, and his concern that the two great nations will clash. That’s a project worthy of respect. Unfortunately, China and the US have less common ground than he imagines, and China’s engineering prowess reposes on an ideological base that is alien to those of us who grew up in liberal democracies.

It’s not even as if all Chinese agree that this is the China their forebears dreamed of. A century ago, the students of China summoned Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. They were never going to get the latter, given the warlord chaos of the era. But Mr. Science offered a way to rebuild China—challenging authority, pitching empiricism against dogma, inquiry against received truth.

Sadly, what China got instead was science conscripted as authority, with engineers at the controls. Wang celebrates the engineers. He seems not to have noticed that the very force summoned to question power became the language in which power declares itself unquestionable.

Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival

Chris Horton

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Macmillan UK

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 10, 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 336 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1035034026

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1035034024

IF IT FEELS LIKE LIFE pummels you harder with every passing day, spare a thought for Taiwan President Lai Ching-te, urges writer Chris Horton, in the opening salvo of his engaging new release, Ghost Island.

Taiwan’s recently tottered into the ranks of superaged societies with over 20% of its population aged 65 or older. Add to that one of the world's lowest fertility rates. It’s a demographic shift that’s created widespread labor shortages across government, military and private sectors.

Young Taiwanese increasingly struggle with economic hardships as living costs rise while wages stagnate, making homeownership nearly impossible. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party bears the brunt of this frustration after nearly a decade in power.

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, led by TSMC, demands enormous electricity and water resources, straining infrastructure already challenged by climate change and frequent droughts. Nuclear power remains politically contentious despite its potential benefits.

And then, as Horton puts it, there’s China …

Taiwan’s assertive giant to the west—a rising nation with grievances—daily escalates its pressure campaign on its diminutive neighbor. Fighter jet incursions, cyberattacks on government and private institutions, and disinformation campaigns are routine. Chinese vessels regularly steal resources from Taiwan's waters and are linked to undersea cable sabotage.

Beijing’s cognitive warfare promotes three key messages: Taiwan belongs to China, America is a fickle ally, and peaceful surrender offers the only path to preserving current freedoms.

Notes Horton:

Although the PLA Rocket Force is untested in actual combat, it is considered world-class. In any areas where China lags behind the US, it is quickly closing the gap – including its nuclear arsenal, which is being built up rapidly and in extreme secrecy. As Beijing intensifies pressure on Taiwan across various domains, Chinese military planners are clearly preparing for more than a simple confrontation against its smaller neighbour. Using the vast, sparsely populated regions in western China for exercises, the PLA Rocket Force has conducted long-distance missile attack simulations on targets that resemble American and Japanese warships.

China warnings are stark: severe consequences for Japan, the Philippines, and Australia if they dare support Taiwan or the United States during any future conflict. Beijing’s intimidation tactics became chillingly explicit in 2023 when China's ambassador to the Philippines delivered a menacing message to Manila: think twice about allowing American military access to northern bases near Taiwan if you value the safety of 150,000 Filipino workers currently in Taiwan.

While Taiwan remains China's primary objective, the United States sits in Beijing's crosshairs. China’s arsenal extends far beyond conventional military forces. The notorious Chinese cyber group Volt Typhoon has successfully penetrated critical American infrastructure networks, compromising ports, water treatment plants, and oil and gas facilities. These digital intrusions specifically target strategic locations like Guam and Hawaii—essential staging areas for any potential U.S. military response.

Creating chaos within the US economy and general public before or during an attack could buy China crucial time to establish a foothold, making takeover inevitable before American forces could even respond. Growing ties between China, Russia and North Korea raise the specter of coordinated actions: Russia targeting NATO members, North Korea provoking South Korea, and China invading Taiwan simultaneously—overwhelming US military capabilities.

In short, any Chinese assault on Taiwan would likely escalate into regional war. War games consistently predict massive casualties regardless of outcome, with potential nuclear brinksmanship. Bloomberg estimates such conflict would cost $10 trillion globally—10% of world GDP—dwarfing COVID-19's economic impact—and let’s not imagine that we’ve bounced back from that disaster.

We're still recovering from the pandemic, and that’s only the beginning of our troubles. The global economy is teetering with the weakest half-decade of growth in at least 30 years, while J.P. Morgan sees a 40% probability that the US/global economy will enter a recession by the end of 2025. The number of developing economies in debt distress was at the highest level since 2000, creating a powder keg of financial instability.

Meanwhile, the world burns with violence. Conflict levels have almost doubled in the past five years, from 104,371 conflict events in 2020 to nearly 200,000 this year. Political violence increased by 25% globally in 2024 compared to 2023, with 223,000 people killed. In the beginning of 2025, conflict event rates are expected to grow by 15% due to more bombings and battles, resulting in approximately 20,000 reported fatalities per month.

Ukraine bleeds as the world's deadliest conflict continues its brutal grind. Gaza remains buried under rubble with over 45,000 Palestinians killed. Sudan's civil war has created one of history's largest humanitarian catastrophes, while Myanmar's chaos involves 170 distinct armed groups weekly. The Sahel explodes with jihadist violence, Mexico's cartel wars claim thousands, and Haiti descends into gang-controlled anarchy.

This volatile landscape makes any Taiwan conflict potentially catastrophic—a final domino that could flatten an already recumbent world order.

It may not sound that way, but at the heart of Horton’s book is the story of Taiwan. Haunting its sidelines is the question, why on earth would Xi Jinping want it—a small island with a population smaller than Australia’s—so badly he’s willing to risk essential global stability to make it his own?

China’s already a global power with the world's second-largest economy. Why risk everything for a mountainous outcrop the size of Belgium that Beijing has never controlled?

Two compelling reasons drive Xi's obsession—perhaps if we factor in his father complex there’s a third—both centered on power, runs Horton’s thesis. First, Taiwan would transform China’s strategic position overnight. Currently trapped behind the First Island Chain—a democratic barrier including South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines—China's coastline remains confined to shallow waters where its submarines are easily tracked. Seizing Taiwan would instantly make China a Pacific power, allowing submarines to disappear into deep ocean trenches right off Taiwan's coast.

More crucially, Taiwan sits at the intersection of the Pacific, Sea of Japan, and South China Sea—the world's busiest waterways. Beijing could control global commerce flow, turning the tap of international trade on and off at will.

Second, conquering Taiwan would elevate Xi above Mao as Communist China's greatest leader while crushing Asia's most vibrant democracy. If America failed to defend Taiwan, Asian allies would likely shift toward Beijing, democracy would recede across the region, and China would emerge as the dominant Asian superpower.

OK, next question: why not just fold? Why would Taiwan resist? Horton replies:

Within living memory, the Taiwanese people have endured levels of repression and fear of state retribution similar to those faced by Chinese citizens today. This is one of many reasons that the Taiwanese population overwhelmingly reject any union with China.

For many Taiwanese, any animosity towards China is aimed primarily at the CCP, not the Chinese people. The Taiwanese are acutely aware of the long journey to freedom, having once been even more isolated and politically indoctrinated than China is today.

In the course of my [Horton’s] reporting in Taiwan, both older and younger Taiwanese have expressed sympathy for their Chinese neighbors. Whether from first-hand experience or through stories told by elder relatives, the Taiwanese see echoes of their recent dark past in Xi Jinping’s modern China.

One of Horton’s strengths is his focus on the waves of people’s that made the island their home.

Horton does an outstanding job of elucidating the growing acceptance of Indigenous people in Taiwanese society—how they've gained new political importance as living refutations of Beijing's territorial claims on the island.

Their rhetorical power blazed forth in January 2019, when leaders from two dozen tribes issued a devastating response to Xi Jinping's speech calling Taiwanese “compatriots” while threatening military force. Days after Xi's hyper-nationalist address at the Great Hall of the People, Taiwan's first peoples delivered their counterpunch, in the form of a letter.

Once called ‘barbarians,’ we are now recognized as the original owners of Taiwan. We, the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, have pushed this nation forward towards respect for human rights, democracy and freedom. After thousands of years, we are still here.

We have never given up our rightful claim to the sovereignty of Taiwan [. . .] Nevertheless, Taiwan is also a nation that we are striving to buildtogether with other peoples who recognize the distinct identity of thisland. Taiwan is a nation accommodating diverse peoples trying to under-stand each other’s painful pasts, as well as a nation in which we can tell our own stories in our own languages, loudly.

In a world in which Chinese and Taiwan have become equivalent, a hypothetical Austronesian empire would stretch from Madagascar to Easter Island, encompassing Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Hawaii, and countless Pacific islands. This empire would house nearly half a billion people and cover more area than any country on Earth.

This review of Ghost Nation glosses over the enormously important Japanese colonial period—we’ll look at that later in the review of Taiwan Travelogue (below). Let’s jump now to the Nationalist, KMT era.

To paraphrase Horton, China’s honeymoon in Formosa lasted exactly six weeks. Taiwanese writer Ong Thiam-teng captured the initial euphoria in August 1946: “We Taiwanese were extremely happy when the pillar of [Japanese] imperialism crumbled... with an excitement as if we could reach heaven in one step.” But reality crashed down hard. “We are now like a ship without oars, floating in the open sea,” he lamented.

Ong's transformation from optimist to “Iron Councillor”—a nickname earned for his fierce criticism of KMT corruption—mirrors Taiwan's collective disillusionment. Initially hopeful about joining the “motherland,” Taiwanese quickly discovered they'd traded one colonial master for another, arguably worse one.

The looting began immediately in September 1945, operating on three devastating levels. First came ragged soldiers grabbing anything movable from streets and villages. Next, ROC officers seized control of supply depots. Finally, Governor Chen Yi's inner circle devoured Japan's massive agricultural and industrial stockpiles, leaving Taiwan's economy in ruins within a year.

The KMT didn't just steal public assets—they confiscated private homes and family property, creating "ill-gotten assets" that remain a explosive political issue today. What began as liberation became systematic pillaging, transforming Taiwanese joy into bitter resistance.

On a bitter February evening in 1947, a widow selling cigarettes outside Taipei's Pegasus Teahouse sparked a revolution that would define Taiwan's destiny. When Officer Yeh Te-ken struck Lin Chiang-mai with his gun butt for selling contraband cigarettes, then Officer Fu Hsueh-tung fired into the enraged crowd, killing a bystander, they lit the fuse of an island-wide rebellion.

By February 28th, 2,000 protesters marched through Taipei carrying banners demanding "a life for a life." They ransacked the Monopoly Bureau, beating Chinese staff to death and setting the building ablaze. When soldiers fired from rooftops into the crowd, protesters stormed the radio station, broadcasting in Taiwanese for the first time since Japanese rule: "Instead of starving to death, we should stand up and fight."

Within hours, all of Taiwan erupted. For a brief, intoxicating moment, the Taiwanese people controlled their homeland. Students, workers, and shopkeepers suddenly found themselves running the island while terrified Chinese officials cowered indoors.

But Chen Yi was already summoning reinforcements from the mainland. On March 8th, two battalions landed at Keelung, beginning the massacre Taiwanese still call "ererba"—228. The slaughter that followed would haunt Taiwan for decades, creating the foundational trauma that would eventually forge an unshakeable determination: never again would Formosa submit to Chinese rule.

Taiwan/Formosa had undergone trauma after trauma and would never be the same again. Yes, the Japanese were colonial occupiers. To see the Chinese in the same light would alter Taiwan’s relationship with its vast neighbor forever.

Chen Yi and the KMT had retaken control of Taiwan. While state propaganda initially boasted of successfully suppressing the 228 rebellion, it would quickly switch to suppressing the memory of 228. In the thirty-six years between 1948 and 1984, major newspapers in Taiwan only mentioned 228 four times. It wasn’t until the end of martial law in 1987 that the Taiwanese finally began to feel safe to discuss 228.

The 228 Incident—or the fact that had reclaimed a place on the public agenda—arguably created post martial-war Taiwanese identity. As the KMT lost mainland China, it had chosen to terrorize Taiwan's people, setting them on a path of determined resistance that would eventually forge today's vibrant democracy.

International media now calls the KMT Taiwan's “largest opposition party,” a shorthand that glosses over its dark history. The KMT denied an entire generation basic democratic freedoms, keeping 228 out of public discourse to maintain its right to rule. Everyone knew American support enabled Chiang's atrocities while Washington kept criticisms of its anti-Communist ally muted and private.

Just as 228 catalyzed decades of Taiwanese oppression from 1947 onwards, the eventual public reckoning with these massacres became the foundation for one of the world's freest democracies. Taiwan’s democracy didn't emerge despite 228—it emerged because of it.

The 228 massacres forged modern Taiwanese identity. Losing mainland China, the KMT chose terror over governance, inadvertently setting Taiwan on a collision course toward the vibrant democracy that would eventually—through extraordinary struggle and luck—emerge decades later.

The media casually scripts the KMT as Taiwan's “largest opposition party”–but that’s glossing a hugely complex problem.As the KMT lost mainland China to Mao's Communists, the KMT inadvertently set Taiwan on a collision course with democracy that would eventually—through extraordinary struggle and luck—emerge decades later.

Ghost Nation's true strength lies not merely in revealing Taiwan as liminal—an uncertain space, an indistinct identity—but in its telling of the story of how Taiwan triumphed over forces that might have erased it entirely—still threaten to do so.

China's vision is one of imposed uniformity, the antithesis of the diversity that defines Taiwan's essence. The odds, admittedly, favor the colossus—we remain too mesmerized by the Middle Kingdom's ascendant power, too fearful of its reach and its ever-threatening military might. Yet beyond the familiar democracy-versus-autocracy narrative lies something more profound: Taiwan's singular courage to confront its own darkness. In a world increasingly defined by selective memory and manufactured histories, Taiwan's willingness to face its ghosts marks it as both brave and irreplaceable.

If we must choose, we would obviously choose democracy over authoritarianism. But democracy is not easy—just as the messy, painful, essential work of confronting truth is so much more difficult than the seductive comfort of forgetting.

Ghost Nation occupies a unique place in this landscape. It confronts the past not as an educational exercise aimed at expanding our horizons, but as a reckoning with uncomfortable truths, preferably shelved, forgotten.

If China is a self-aggrandizing fabrication of power. Taiwan, by contrast, is what Horton describes as the land of hungry ghosts—visible yet unacknowledged, vital yet unwelcome. Every seventh lunar month, usually in August or September, the gates of hell open and these ghosts—spirits without descendants or proper burials—are released to wander among the living, desperately seeking food and care.

Colonial rulers once banned Ghost Month's ceremonies, perhaps sensing how these wandering spirits reflected their own failures to care for the island's people. Today's Taiwan embodies this spectral existence on the global stage. One of the world's wealthiest democracies, the semiconductor powerhouse of our digital lives, yet its president cannot enter most foreign capitals or speak at international forums. The island floats in diplomatic limbo—too important to ignore, too dangerous to embrace.

The absurdity? Taiwan's isolation stems not from Chinese pressure alone but from our own calculated indifference. While Beijing threatens and blusters, democratic nations have quietly ghosted Taiwan for decades, seduced by mainland markets and terrified of confrontation. We are the perpetrators of this phantom state, maintaining a thriving democracy at arm's length while profiting from its innovations.

This comfortable arrangement may not endure. Our refusal to fully recognize Taiwan's legitimacy risks consequences far graver than diplomatic protests—potentially sacrificing a free society to appease authoritarian ambitions.

Yet Taiwan remains as scrappy as it is inventive—more inclined to legislative fistfights than rubber-stamp approvals for a third tenure of any Great Helmsman. Sadly, the price it may pay for this democratic unruliness could be obliteration as a political entity.

Ghost Nation fascinates to the extent it brings Taiwan to life more vividly than any recent work; it terrifies insofar as it sketches Xi Jinping's final "solution"—a playbook in which diversity and inventiveness, the refusal to fall into lockstep orthodoxy, wins nothing but authoritarian punishment.

What we can only hope is that Ghost Nation, an important book, as another book written by an American obsessed with Taiwan was in its day, will not become the prolonged obituary that Formosa Betrayed became and still is.

Derecognition: How Americans In Taiwan Surmounted Multiple Crises and Helped Shape the Taiwan Relations Act When the US Broke Diplomatic Relations with a Loyal Ally

Robert Parker, with Don Shapiro

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bookside Press

• Publication date : ‎ April 9, 2025

• Language : ‎ English

• Print length ‏: ‎ 198 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 177883616X

• ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-1778836169

ON THE MORNING of December 16, 1978, President Jimmy Carter delivered a shock blow to Taiwan: Communist China was now the sole legitimate government and the US would terminate all diplomatic relations with Taiwan, effective January 1, 1979.

It was the end of a three-decade, client state relationship—a Cold War protectorate relationship if you’d prefer—turning to the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” (as MacArthur called it), depending entirely on US backing for legitimacy and security.

The US also provided massive financial assistance, maintained military bases and advisors on the island, and Taiwan essentially operated under American security guarantees through the Mutual Defense Treaty.

But Taiwan was the junior partner relying on American patronage for its very survival—and its situation was even more precarious after losing the mainland to the Communists.

Taiwan's President Chiang Ching-kuo—son of Chiang Kai-shek—faced this betrayal with remarkable determination, vowing to transform crisis into opportunity through self-reliance. American businesses, residents, and Taiwan's entire future hung in diplomatic limbo.

Another—and far more surprising player in the upheaval is one —Robert Parker, a lawyer heading an international firm in Taipei and newly elected president of the American Chamber of Commerce, you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of him. Yes, a relative unknown other than to a few outsiders, Parker mobilized to protect American interests and Taiwan's welfare. His testimony before Congress transformed the State Department's inadequate “omnibus bill” into the robust Taiwan Relations Act, signed into law April 10, 1979.

The timing was right. Taiwan was engaged in engineering an economic miracle, transforming iteslf through massive infrastructure investment and technological development. It attracted luminaries like Patrick Haggerty from Texas Instruments and Bob Evans from IBM to guide a high-tech revolution. Former students returned from abroad, creating the electronics powerhouse that would transform Taiwan into the global supply chain powerhouse it’s known as today.

Within two decades, an island, a territory, a state, a country … a state of mind? that proclaimed itself “Free China” until the words began to ring hollow, out of tune with the impossible reality the new Taiwan had become.

By 1997, the IMF reclassified Taiwan from “Newly Industrialized” to “Other Advanced Economies.” Asian Business Week captured the extraordinary transformation in a front page-grabbing headliner: “Why Taiwan Matters? The Global Economy Couldn't Function Without It.”

Parker's Taiwan Relations Act endures forty-five years on, proving that American betrayal inadvertently forged Taiwan's greatest strength—the determination to survive and thrive alone. What began as diplomatic abandonment became economic independence, creating a democracy too valuable for the world to lose.

Carter the sellout—peanuts and friends

On its renunciation:

Taipei was ablaze with banners denouncing Carter, some in English, most in Chinese. A sign festooned along a median fence near my office on Zhongshan North Road read: “Carter Sells Peanuts. Also Friends.”

Carter may have been the nexus of Taiwan fury, but as Don Shapiro, a veteran Taiwan expert (and coauthor of this book), puts it in the words of Robert P. Parker:

With the Chamber’s board and committees hard at work on the four local projects, I concentrated on preparing for the mission to Washington, to present AmCham’s position on what would become the Taiwan Relations Act.

Many foreign reporters based in Taiwan, myself included, consider the way most international publications dodge Taiwan’s undeniable sovereignty indefensible. But for Taiwanese journalists working for international media who are forced to deny their country’s statehood, this wilful denigration of their government is not just a professional issue, but also a personal one.

‘As someone born and raised in Taiwan, it definitely sucks,’ one Taiwanese journalist told me. ‘But it’s also part of being Taiwanese –  you see Taiwan as its own country growing up, until you experience the wider world, and then you see its statehood denied.

The details:

Among the institutions vital to expatriate life in Taiwan, English-language radio was the one in greatest jeopardy from derecognition. Taipei American School would carry on in one form or another, the American Club would continue as a haven for families in one location or another, and parents would find places for their kids to play games, but the only English-language broadcasting station in Taiwan was about to permanently shut down and its broadcasting equipment taken away to be scrapped.

A Radio Station by Any Other Name

Parkers tale–and in honesty, it’s homespun, very Taiwan, even if it it touches on issues of global significance. The passages on ICRT, for example, Taiwan claiming an English-language radio station to it own with more freedom than anything broadcast in Taiwan before, is of course important, but far more so to insiders than to outsiders. But that’s not to gloss over what it brought to Taiwan:

In the decade that followed, audience surveys showed year after year that ICRT attracted more than a million listeners. The non-profit station became a commercial success contributing to environmental, women’s rights and other worthy causes. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, other Taiwan stations copied ICRT’s innovations, and the rise of satellite broadcasting and the internet inevitably reduced the size of radio’s overall audience. In 1979 and throughout the 1980s, however, ICRT was the cultural lifeline of Americans in Taiwan. Moreover, as James Soong told the authors in an interview for this book, "‘If we didn’t have this English-speaking radio [station at that time], we would have been cut off from the outside world.’

Derecognition reads like a yearbook of a vanished world—a tender catalog of an American community that once flourished—in Taiwan, as it happens—now preserved only in institutional memory. It's the memoir of an expatriate enclave that had to transform itself overnight when the diplomatic ground shifted beneath its feet, leaving behind a detailed record of how a displaced community negotiated its survival.

The focus on Taipei American School captures something poignant transplanted slice of America, complete with parent-elected school boards and familiar curricula, suddenly orphaned when the treaties that protected it disappeared. The book becomes a kind of institutional archaeology, documenting the delicate work of transforming official ties into “unofficial” relationships—the minutiae of relocating schools from flood-ravaged campuses, negotiating radio station licenses, preserving the American Club's social fabric.

There's something deeply surreal about reading these intimate, human-scale stories of a community learning to survive diplomatic abandonment. Parent-teacher committees and campus flooding concerns, the careful bureaucratic dance of maintaining American institutions without American protection—all preserved with the meticulous care of a school annual, complete with the awkward formality of official photographs and the underlying melancholy of something irretrievably lost.

Yet this small island that America formally abandoned in 1979, this place reduced to yearbook memories and institutional workarounds, now sits at the center of what could become the most consequential geopolitical crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The same Taiwan that had to reinvent its American school because it lost diplomatic protection has become the potential flashpoint for global catastrophe, the place where World War III might begin.

It's like discovering that the forgotten high-school town of your shadowy memories now powers the digital backbone of your ephemerally interconnected office life—maybe WWIII, IIII even, who can keep count?

Derecognition sneaks up on the reader. Everyone’s supposed to love Jimmy Carter, but what if in his avuncular generosity, he underestimated the power he ruled over—and even more terrifyingly the power that was to become its arch enemy, China. There was a time, after all, in which it was right to give the downtrodden Middle Kingdom a long-denied shot at the place in the world in deserved.

Whatever might be said about the US, it has so far managed to avoid leading us into a war of globally catastrophic proportions—although that may be luck.

China may be less lucky. Derecognition then would be a disaster—slow in the making, probably, but very fast in its unravelling, to paraphrase Hemingway.

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Taiwan Tavelogue

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Translated by Lin King

• ASIN ‏: ‎ B0D9F5ZHL4

• Publisher ‏: ‎ Graywolf Press

• Publication date ‏: ‎ November 12, 2024

The ghosts of Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue are separated by more than a century from Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation—half a century removed from the dispossessed of Derecognition. The places these three books occupy are displaced in time, recognizable, and yet vastly different.

The Japan of Taiwan Travelogue—having lost WWII—is, for example, the ravaged nation that has no choice but to hand over its colonial baton to the defeated Nationalists of China, the latest in Taiwan’s long string of colonizers. It jars for the modern reader familiar with Tawan and China to see the word “mainland” and realize it refers to Japan, but Japan had that moment.

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Meanwhile, there’s far more trickery going on in Taiwan Travelogue than the antics of the ghost world. The entire book is a literary prank—an arch play on the reader that has, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, won awards for translation—the US National Book Award for Translated Fiction is one—and yet its provenance as translation? It’s more like fiction in multiple languages—chiefly, Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese—and in the edition reviewed by this reader written in English

Was Taiwan Travelogue the work of an imagined Japanese writer–the Great Cedar, as she calls herself, despite her less than towering height (itself a poke at the burgeoning Japanese empire?) Was she an imagined Japanese ahead of her time, intellectually attuned to colonial 1938 Taiwan? Was the Japanese manuscript lost, found by an adopted daughter, who sent it to the character's daughter before translating it into Chinese.

No.

The actual author Yang Shuang-zi says she and her sister “wrote” the the English translation—is the word “wrote” deliberate, a further word play, even though the translator is Lin King?

The pen name associated with the book suggests it’s written by twins (shuangzi, the given name, although why both twins would be given the name “twin” suggests only a pun). They’re not twins. More mercurial mystification. But the book is inspired by the love of a twin. I’ll let the Japan Times step in:

Yang Shuang-zi is the pen name of Yang Jo-Tzu, 40, a native of Taichung, Taiwan. The word “shuang-zi” means “twins” in Chinese (written with the same kanji as the Japanese word “futago”) and pays homage to the late Yang Jo-Hui, Jo-Tzu’s twin sister who passed away from cancer in 2015.

But to return to the metafiction at play here—as dense at times as the roiling descriptions of the dishes that litter the book (has ever a book relished in the act of eating as much as Taiwan Travelogue? The answer, this reader and reviewer will suggest is a decided no). Forgive the suggestion, but this really is the Marquis de Sade of the culinary world, but with better taste, and don’t feel obliged to forgive that pun.

Certainly, no other book has ever done such an all-consuming job of extolling the cuisine of Taiwan—no room here for the regional cuisines of China.

But to return to the metafiction, the fictional Japanese voice that bestows its love on the gastronomy of Taiwan is convincing enough for the book’s many readers to come away convinced that the author is who she’s claimed to be.

But in the end our Japanese author is a fictional Japanese colonizer through whose eyes Yang explores themes of power, translation, and colonial relationships.

Aoyama Chizuko does not exist and never existed. She is entirely a fictional character created by Yang Shuang-zi.

The entire literary conceit–a retrieved Japanese travelogue that is fictional, no original Japanese text, no historical Japanese author named Aoyama Chizuko, no real travelogue from 1938. The itself is almost a ghost:

The term wānshēng originated when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule, and its meaning is exactly what the Han characters imply: Japanese people born in Taiwan. By blood we belonged to the great Yamato race, but as Japanese citizens we were “subpar”; growing up on the subtropical island, our use of the national language, Japanese, was often nonstandard, and few of us had ever seen snow or truly experienced the four seasons …

In many senses, the wānshēng are homeless, casteless ghosts. However, there are perspectives to which only ghosts are privy. For instance, there are certain things that only we ghosts [the ghosts of a Japanese empire past, or other past would be empires over Taiwan?) would notice within Aoyama Chizuko’s novel.

Who those ghosts are and what it is they might be able to elucidate to us is never made clear–or this reader missed a crucial nuance—but Taiwan is still to this day, marginal, ghostlike, a liminality that lacks the luxuries of identity taken for granted by most other nations—today claimed by a giant neighbor it will be hard pressed to keep at bay forever.

ACADEMIC REVIEWS of Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interests Come First, a Chinese Communist Party history, as viewed via the prism of party elder (and father of Xi Jinping) Xi Zhongxun, invariably refer to the party elder’s alleged “humanism” – or his “humanistic nature.” He’s also referred to as a “reformer.”

For the non-academic reader—like this reviewer—it’s a refrain that strikes a dissonant note. After all, Xi the elder, at the tender age of 14, launched his political career with an assassination attempt of a school administrator .

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In his defense—it was the end his formal education—the boy was obviously out to burnish his revolutionary credentials. In that sense, the action might be construed—in this long but riveting saga of Shakespearean intrigue, feuds and revenge—as noble. But by the book’s closing pages our aged party loyalist is Lear-like exiled from cradle-to-grave followers of his creed and quite likely just as Lear-like in rudderless madness.

Skip forward to the closing pages—and no spoiler alerts needed:

In August 1990 … According to the diaries of Li Rui, one of Mao’s former secretaries, at a meeting of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, Xi screamed at Premier Li Peng, leading Li Rui to write, ‘This demonstrates that his mental situation has, at the very least, completely lost control.’

Perhaps it was all preordained. But a young Comrade Zhongxun, born in what was poised to become the very crucible of the revolution, Shaanxi, the Northwest Military and Administrative Region, wasn’t to know that. Yes, as early as the 1930s, signs abounded that the revolution would never stop devouring itself. But it would have required superhuman foresight to not only see that but also imagine that, somehow, time and time again, the party would sit up in bed and find the vigor to reassert itself as the forge of Chinese greatness.

In the beginning, being a revolutionary like Comrade Zhongxun was hardship—hardship in the cause of ideological purity. It was hardship all around. His father died shortly after he was released from prison at the age of 15 (for his poisoning attempt), his mother and two sisters died in famine.

“Many of his former colleagues, as well as his own family, suffered terribly because of their connections with him—some were even persecuted to death, including a daughter,” Torigian writes.

By the time the revolution came to Xi’s neck of the woods in Shaanxi, with Mao Zedong and his long marchers making Yan’an their home, Xi, the homegrown revolutionary was regarded with suspicion. But then so was everybody else.

Xi and more prominent leaders, such as Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, were incarcerated by fellow Communists. For the rest of his life, Xi would claim that the party’s plan had been to bury him alive. Mao and the rest of the central leadership, nearing total exhaustion after months of fleeing Nationalist forces on the Long March, stumbled upon the Shaanxi Communists.

The idea that Xi was about to be “buried alive” was probably embellished in the telling – likely elaborated over the years to emphasize Mao’s importance at a critical revolutionary juncture, redounding also to Xi’s importance in the grand scheme of things.

But Xi and others like him in Shaanxi were most certainly purged—it’s almost a page-by-page occurrence over the course of Party First. And Xi, like others who were lucky enough to survive come out of it, did so reforged—men (and it was almost always men) born anew.

Incarcerated, in brutal conditions, Xi reportedly said, “If I die, that is also dying for the revolution. And if I survive, I will redouble my efforts for the party …

Xi suffered terribly. Still in summer clothes, he slept in the cold Shaanxi weather tied up with ropes and crawling with lice … About two hundred of his fellow cadres were executed by their own party.

Such were the imperatives of the time. Xi may have got to live another day, but it’s not as if the purge itself was ever declared a mistake: Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Peng Dehuai confirmed that “people had been wrongly incarcerated” but apparently cleaved to the line of a Central Committee document that such purges were necessary in the struggle against “rightist surrenderism” and the “purge of counterrevolutionary rightists.”

This is one of many points in Torigian’s book in which most readers might start to wonder about sheer possibility of Xi’s “humanism”—not to mention his reformist character. It’s not as if, despite some reported distaste for the kind of mass purges he himself suffered from, he ever took a firm stand against the party’s tendency to make punishable sins of thought crimes.

Looming over all this is a question—an unpalatable question if you cleave to the notion that the revolution was well intentioned and had good elements, of whom Xi Jinping is one. The question is, are “humanistic” actors even feasible within the system that the Chinese Communist Party somehow brought into being the country we today recognize as China.

It’s quite possible that the “humanism” ascribed to Xi by certain China-watchers was always a chimera. Yes, it to would be gratifying to find at least a hint of something redemptive in the party system that remolded China from “old” to “new.” But was it ever a grand project with legs?

As Russian historian Roi Medvedev writes, no one in a Leninist system could occupy a top post and not “from time to time betray one’s own friends, associates, or completely innocent people. Everyone made their own choice, and everyone sought justifications for their transgressions

The Party’s Interests Come First": The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping

Joseph Torigian

Stanford University Press

June 3, 2025

718 pages

ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-1503634756

A Revolutionary Education

Xi Zhongxun's formal educational shortfall—it never extended beyond his early teens—might seem like a limitation, but it may have been the perfect preparation for his role as revolutionary seducer in chief. Without the theoretical sophistication that foreign study provided other leaders, Xi operated on pure revolutionary instinct—he understood that power meant making people complicit in their own subjugation.

Just as he did—it’s a subject that comes up again and again in Party First—the purged, the punished, the bludgeoned and starved in frigid rooms ideally come out of the experience reborn, a newly zealous converts to the revolution. It’s a subject that Torigian steers away from analyzing. This is a book that is thankfully free of any attempt at psychoanalysis, although it’s difficult not to be struck by the cult-like elements that are key to bonding its revolutionaries to their cause.

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The United Front—and it was there that Xi Zhongxun spent most of his party career, a dangerous job because it put one close to non-revolutionary elements—wasn't diplomacy; it was arguably a systematic corruption machine designed to compromise potential opponents. Xi's famous charm, his friendship with the Panchen Lama, his sympathy for the Tibetan spiritual cause, for the ethnic interests of the far western former East Turkestan regions, the plight of the Inner Mongolians … Were these signs of humanity shining through amid complex ethnic diversity?

They’re arguably the system working exactly as designed—or as the cards fall nicely into place—Xi's natural gifts drawing in religious and ethnic leaders in webs of obligation and false friendship.

When hardliners later attacked Xi for the relationships that made successes for party policy, for which he has been lauded for as a humanistic reformer, as much as anything they were scapegoating him for implementing party policy too successfully. The revolution had left Xi with no option but to betray when circumstances demanded it, even if included United Front “friends”—silently complicit, for example, when the vice tightened on Tibetan protests.

To be sure, Xi the elder is a complicated character. Torigian, who is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University and a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University, draws on three-volume Chinese biography by Jia Jiuchuan, the diaries of Li Rui, former secretary to Mao. He also draws on Warren Sun and Fred Teiwes in their reassessment of Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer, allowing the reader to ponder whether Deng really was the reformer so many histories have portrayed him as.

The work of Sun and Teiwes is particularly valuable because they've consistently emphasized the messiness of modern Chinese party histories, questioning the neat, linear narratives of the past. Their books suggest policy emerging from complex factional struggles, bureaucratic compromises, and often accidental developments—not from the vision of singular leaders.

The Party’s Interests Come First may not provide razor sharp insights into Xi Jinping, the man who puts the party’s interest first in today’s China, but what it does do, via a range of new sources, is to give us renewed insight into the party that controls China.

And that might do much to explain why the book jars at time to the Western reader. We come to the book expecting either technocratic management or standard authoritarianism, but rather—in Xi the elder—we get someone who genuinely believes in the transformative power of revolutionary discipline and ideological purity—concepts that feel almost medieval in a globalized, market-driven world.

The "anachronistic" framing is particularly powerful because it suggests Xi Jinping isn't just authoritarian, he's temporally displaced. He's applying 1940s revolutionary methods to 2020s problems. The anti-corruption campaigns, the ideological education, the emphasis on party purity—these aren't modern governance techniques, they're revolutionary practices being imposed on a society that has moved far beyond the conditions that made them relevant.

The Son Rises

Outside the box of the narrative, the reader is confronted by Xi Zhongxun, his most famous son and others in their milieu being close to crushed—some of them are crushed—by the fickle vicissitudes of rectification campaigns and purges, as they’re “forged” in “struggle” that leads to rebirth and sunk-cost doubling down on commitment to the party and revolution.

But the 1980s offered Xi Zhongxun what appeared to be vindication. His United Front methods—the patient cultivation of ethnic leaders, the tactical flexibility, the calculated charm—suddenly looked like prescient policy rather than dangerous accommodation. Special Economic Zones weren't ideological compromise but proof that the revolution could absorb anything, even capitalism, and emerge stronger.

But this apparent triumph contained the seeds of Xi's final tragedy. The very success of his methods in the 1980s deepened his investment in a system that was preparing to devour him. Each “reform” that bore his name, each minority leader who accepted party authority through his mediation, each foreign visitor charmed by his affability—all became evidence of the revolution’s adaptability, not his humanity.

And yet … One of the most psychologically fascinating aspects of Xi Zhongxun's story is how his loyalty to the Party deepened rather than weakened under persecution—a pattern that research on thought reform and cognitive dissonance suggests is more common than we might expect

Beijing could not simply turn back the clock to 1952. Although the party’s failures, as well as many years away from the center of power, facilitated a zeal among senior cadres to right the ship of the revolution in the twilight of their lives, decades of persecution meant something quite different for many of China’s ethnic minorities and religious faithful. While everyone went through tribulations, the ethnic minorities suffered at the hands of the Han. And it was not only the Bolsheviks who could find meaning in the “forge” of adversity. As China exited the long tunnel of the Mao years, party leaders were shocked when religious activity exploded after the Cultural Revolution. Thinking that the influence of the Dalai Lama had been extinguished, when a group from Dharamsala visited Lhasa, the local authorities asked the crowds not to attack the members of the group or to spit at them. The cadres were then stunned when the prostrating crowds mobbed the Dalai Lama’s representative, weeping and shouting anti-Han slogans.7 In 1979, near the Catholic pilgrimage site of Sheshan, a demon, before it was exorcised, foretold the coming of Mary. In March 1980, about ten thousand Catholics who heard the news of the prophecy traveled to Sheshan. They broke into the church, which was still officially closed, and knelt down in the dust.

When things began to unravel, the question of whether Xi privately opposed the Tiananmen massacre misunderstands what he had become by 1989. After decades of making the party's interests indistinguishable from moral truth, genuine opposition would have required him to acknowledge that his entire life's work—all those United Front successes, all those careful accommodations—had been in service of something monstrous.

Instead, he did what the revolution had trained him to do: he supported the decision “as he had done so many other times earlier in his life.” The phrase reads like an epitaph for whatever remained of the man beneath the revolutionary. By the time tanks rolled into the square, Xi Zhongxun was no longer psychologically capable of rebellion against the system that had so thoroughly colonized his conscience.

Xi Jinping, his son, rose to power gradually, beginning in 2007 when he was appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, culminating in his assumption of the top leadership roles in 2012-2013. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012 and President of China in March 2013.

Many Western observers initially viewed Xi as a potentially reformist leader who might liberalize China’s political and economic systems. Several factors contributed to these expectations:

Given China’s previous trajectory of market-oriented reforms under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, many analysts expected Xi to continue this liberalization. His father, Xi Zhongxun, had been associated with economic reforms in the 1980s, leading some to believe the son might follow a similar path.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times—always on hand for a glowing spin on the ineffable—was particularly effusive in his early assessments. In 2013, he wrote pieces suggesting Xi might be China’s “reformer-in-chief” and praised what he saw as Xi's anti-corruption drive as evidence of genuine institutional reform.

Western commentators, in short, projected their own hopes onto Xi's early moves, interpreting his consolidation of power as necessary preparation for major reforms rather than as an end in itself. The anti-corruption campaign was particularly misread—seen as rule-of-law building rather than as a tool for eliminating political rivals and centralizing control, all rulebook plays his father would have recognized.

In the 1980s, Xi developed a reputation as one of the reformers in the CCP. He encouraged the growth of Special Economic Zones and endorsed a certain amount of flexibility on policy matters. He resumed his United Front work, seeking to improve the PRC’s relations with ethnic and religious minorities, and worked with reform-minded leaders like Hu Yaobang. He continues to be remembered as a cadre who worked to achieve a more liberal and humane CCP during that decade.

But how much of a “reformer” could a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary and loyal Party man really be? Torigian explores the limits of Xi Zhongxun’s reform-mindedness, especially in his chapter on the 1989 protests and June Fourth massacre.

Many interviewees told Torigian that they assumed Xi opposed Deng Xiaoping’s decision to use violence against the protesters—a point of view he regards as “tantalizing” but not backed up by available evidence. Xi’s personal thoughts on the crackdown remain unavailable to us, but we do know that in the end, Xi “supported the party after a decision was made, as he had done so many other times earlier in his life.”

In her review of The Party’s Interests Come first, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, quotes Xi Zhongxun as saying:

“I did justice for the party, did justice for the people, and did justice for myself; I did not make ‘leftist’ mistakes, I did not persecute people. My accomplishments have been ordinary. I feel no guilt.

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The tragedy isn’t that a “reformer” was eventually crushed by the system. It’s that by the 1980s, Xi had become so thoroughly the system’s creature that he couldn’t recognize the moral void at his center. His support for the Tiananmen crackdown wasn’t a final betrayal of his principles—it was the logical endpoint of a life spent perfecting the art of ideological justification.

By then, the man who might have once been capable of genuine human feeling had been methodically replaced by revolutionary reflex.

Such as it is, Xi the elder won accolades because he really gave every appearance of pushing for a more understanding, yielding take on governance of Tibet, former East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia—even if the truth was the party’s interests came first.

He was doomed not so much to fail, as to never approach becoming the man others would have him be. But by then the Tiananmen protests had taken place and been put down.

If madness consumed him late in life that should come as no surprise. The fact that Xi the younger is following his father in putting the party’s interests first should come as even less of a surprise.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company

Patrick McGee

• ASIN: ‎ B0DJK2D88B

• Publisher‏: ‎ Scribner

• Publication date: ‎ May 13, 2025

• Print length: ‎ 448 pages

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IN APRIL 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook and two senior Apple executives met with senior government officials at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Communist Party’s secretive leadership compound in Beijing. Xi’s rise to the leadership of all China marked a walking back from the “open-and-reform” Deng Xiaoping era and his administration was alert to the slightest whiff of Western companies overly profiting from business in China.

One firm appeared to be doing just that more than any other. The time had come to give an account of Apple’s global success as a massively scaled business that manufactured everything in China.

Was Apple, as Beijing’s hardliners suspected and as Patrick McGee, in his book Apple in China, puts it, an “exploitative trading company that offered nothing in return,” or, was it, as Apple executives were about to spin the story, “a mass enabler of ‘indigenous innovation’.”

The irony of the spin—and the fact it worked—is that the Apple executives were finally telling a truth they themselves had never acknowledged. One might even take the subtitle of Apple in China—”The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company”–and reframe it as “How the World’s No 1 Company Enabled the Rise of America’s No 1 Strategic Competitor.”

As McGee writes:

Apple’s own balance sheet tells the story: The value of its ‘machinery, equipment and internal-use software’—namely the instruments placed in third-party factories for production—totaled less than $2 billion in 2009, but then soared beyond $44.5 billion by 2016—more than four times the value of all “land and buildings” owned by Apple—as the company took unprecedented control of its supplier network.

The Apple executives left the Beijing hawks with an initially unreported memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission that committed Apple to supporting some key Chinese projects and to invest a massive $275 billion into China over the following five years. Ironically, it wasn’t even “a concession on Apple’s part. It was just the $55 billion the company estimated it’d invested for 2015, multiplied by five years.”

In current US dollar terms, the amount of money Apple was investing into China was more than twice that provided by the Marshall Plan to rebuild post-WWII Europe ($131 billion). At the time, the chief administrator of the plan had called it “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people."

McGee states his case early in Apple in China: “Apple wouldn’t be Apple today without China,” he writes, before adding the book’s real whammy blow: “What this book contends is more intriguing—that China wouldn’t be China today without Apple.

Exactly what Apple’s trio of top executives told Beijing leadership that day isn’t known. But what they were directly signaling to Beijing was that Apple wasn’t just creating millions of jobs in the country; it supported entire industries by facilitating an epic transfer of “tacit knowledge”—hard-to-define but practical know-how “in the art of making things, in organizing practical matters, and in the way people produce, distribute, travel, communicate, and consume,” as the China-born Federal Reserve economist Yi Wen defines it. For Yi, it was the acquisition of this tacit knowledge, rather than democracy or property rights, that acted as “the secret recipe” behind England’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, as well as China’s over the past four decades.

The author tells the Apple story—it takes some 90 pages of well-trodden “Apple rises from the ashes, Jobs returns” narrative to get to the “in China” part—complete with New Yorker-style intros to department heads and legal hands who disappear from the narrative pages later. Given the importance of the book’s central message—China wouldn’t be China without Apple—it seems a waste to let it be subsumed under the weight of Apple’s “in the beginnings” storyline arc. On the other hand, it sets the stage for exactly what the consumer giant walks into despite its Californian "Think Different” corporate culture.

There’s also the question of PRC agency. Was Apple “captured” as the subtitle suggests, or did Apple fall into Beijing’s hands while neither the party nor Apple were really watching?

China brilliantly played its long-term interests against Apple’s short-term needs. In 1999, none of Apple’s products were made in mainland China; by 2009, virtually all were. This rapid consolidation reflects a transfer of technology and know-how so consequential as to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall—but it’s an event that played out over many years, hidden by the twin threats of strict nondisclosure agreements and a censored media landscape where all the action was.

The problem with passages such as this is that in McGee’s own telling, even when the Apple execs have to face up to the fact that they’re under scrutiny at the very highest levels of PRC government for not taking the tried and trusted joint-venture approach to China, when they fess up to just how much money they’re throwing at China’s technological catchup with the West, it has every appearance of being a revelation to everyone except those who are not paying attention. And on the latter, that’s almost everyone.

A line-by-line reading of McGee’s book suggests that Apple walked into its “capture” and the upper echelons of Chinese leadership were not completely getting the picture until notoriously secretive Apple explained it.

It was becoming clear Xi would welcome foreign corporations only if they were “in China, for China”—and if they didn’t like it, they could leave.

That’s the atmosphere in which Apple finally shows its hand—and reality is something that no rising nation state with grievances could say no to.

The CHIPS and Science Act, which is designed to stimulate computer chip fabrication in America, will cost the US government $52 billion over four years—$3 billion shy of what Apple invested annually in China nearly a decade earlier. Let me underscore this point: Apple’s investments in China, every year for the past decade, are at least quadruple the amount the US commerce secretary considered a once-in-a-generation investment.”

To summarize, Apple in China’s central revelation is that Apple's manufacturing relationship with China constituted one of the largest technology transfers in modern history, comparable to geopolitical events like the fall of the Berlin Wall but hidden from view by NDAs and media restrictions. Between 1999 and 2009, Apple shifted from making no products in mainland China to manufacturing virtually everything there. This wasn't just outsourcing—it was systematic knowledge transfer that would reshape global technology competition.

Apple's unique manufacturing challenge producing—as McGee puts it when describing Apple’s qualitative demands—"10 million Ferraris a year" with luxury precision at mass-market scale forced unprecedented collaboration with Chinese suppliers.

The “Apple Squeeze”—a term coined by the author—saw Chinese companies accept soul-crushingly low margins (2-7% versus Apple’s 33%) in exchange for invaluable training from Apple's best engineers, who literally slept on factory floors for months teaching advanced manufacturing processes. This created a superior form of technology transfer that Beijing would have recognized as more effective than traditional espionage or forced joint ventures.

What made this historically unprecedented was that Apple inadvertently played Prometheus, freely handing over the “gift of fire” that China had spent decades trying to acquire through spying, theft, and coercive tactics. Apple’s engineers enthusiastically transferred not just technical specifications but “tacit knowledge”—the practical, experiential know-how that had taken the West centuries to develop and that cannot be learned from textbooks.

Ironically, in this way, Apple inadvertently gives birth to the Chinese smartphone industry. Armed with Apple-taught capabilities, Chinese suppliers enabled domestic brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo to grow from 10% market share in 2009 to 74% by 2014. The iPhone didn't kill Nokia—Chinese companies using Apple’s own manufacturing knowledge did. Apple's $275 billion “investment pledge” in 2016 wasn't even new spending—simply existing operations that already exceeded the Marshall Plan.

Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers in Apple's ecosystem grew from 16 in 2012 to 51 by 2021, overtaking both American and Taiwanese suppliers. Apple sleepwalked into complete dependence on a supply chain they no longer controlled, making their “Made Everywhere” marketing slogan increasingly disconnected from a reality of accelerating Chinese dominance.

The result is a technology transfer that makes Apple the biggest corporate supporter of “Made in China 2025,” Beijing's explicitly anti-Western plan to eliminate dependence on foreign technology. Two dominant feel-good narratives—Apple’s rise and China’s economic miracle—stood in the way of recognition that they were the same story, with profound consequences for global technological leadership.

It’s a context in which it’s tempting to go tabloid and take a cheap shot at the progression: Apple teaches China advanced manufacturing, China achieves self-sufficiency in critical technologies, China no longer needs Western partners, Xi pursues “ultimate demise of capitalism.”

Apple thought they were optimizing their business; they were actually undermining the entire economic system.

In McGee’s magisterial telling, Apple in China—inevitably, given everything that precedes it—ends on a future-trap dark note.

Despite Apple executives' attempts to reassure their board about the possibilities of diversification from China, writes McGee, insiders call these presentations a “con job.”

Apple has sleepwalked into a relationship that "could blow up at any time" with a strategic competitor whose ultimate objectives are fundamentally incompatible with Apple’s survival. An insider tells McGee, “There’s no way that they could diversify from China in any meaningful way within the next five years. It’s just impossible.”

WHEN THE CHINA WATCHER reaches for circumlocutions to parse the Taiwan problem there’s no shortage of clichés at hand.

“Self-ruled island” appears to be the favorite of the harried wire desk editor, who might also reach for the clumsy, “island that China claims as its own,” despite its arch satirical overtones – as if to say, dream on, China. This is what makes “self-governed democracy of 23 million people" a popular alternative.

It’s true that Taiwan is indeed a self-governed democracy of 23 million people, and as democracies go, it’s lively, boisterous even. But, essentially, “self-governed democracy of 23 million people” is an eye-glazer.

Better are the workarounds that genuflect to various aspects of Taiwan’s genuine status, such as “semiconductor powerhouse” and “chip factory to the world” or those that raise the enigmatic issue of Taiwan’s “Silicon shield.”

That’s the theory that Taiwan’s chip sector is so cornerstone to our global economy that China needs Taiwan as much as we need it, which of course is the problem, and why there are books such as “Boiling Moat” and “Rebel Island” – and further cliches such as “tinderbox” and “splittist forces” – the former used by the US propaganda machine and the latter by the PRC equivalent.

That doesn’t mean – it goes without saying – you should skip the books.

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‘Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan’

Jonathan Clements

• Publisher: ‎ Scribe (February, 2024)

• Print length: ‎ 379 pages

• ASIN : ‎ B0C9JZQ2LW

Jonathan Clements, author of A Brief History of the Samurai, Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, A Brief History of Khubilai Khan, Sun Tzu’s Art of War: A New Translation and Confucius: A Biography, among many others, is clearly – if nothing else – an intrepid and prolific producer of books.

Setting his eyes on Taiwan, the result is “Rebel Island,” easily one of the more readable recent accounts of how Taiwan became – or was forged perhaps – into what it is today. Among many pluses to this quick, entertaining read, Clements dismisses the trope of Taiwan’s earliest history as being coincident with its exposure to “civilization.”

The “it all begins with the Dutch” story, among many things, omits the Spanish colony in the north of the island (Gobernación de Hermosa [Formosa] española, 1626-1642), which left behind the remnants of a fort in what was otherwise a short-lived adventure.

But mostly it omits the first Taiwanese themselves.

“Historians favor the Dutch version of history because Fort Zeelandia and its masters in the VOC [the Dutch East India Company; Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie] kept detailed written records, turning the indigenous people into nameless background characters, rebels to be suppressed or clients to be swindled,” the author writes.

In this sense, as at least one Australian reviewer of “Rebel Island” has noted, Taiwan is oddly akin to Australia: both have buried, unwritten, Austronesian-language histories.

Much as Australian history was once given a starting point of 1788, the history of Taiwan has often been written as if it started in 1624, the year the Dutch colonized Taiwan.

Clements turns throughout the book to the tribal histories that preceded and coexisted with the Dutch, the Spanish, the Ming refugees, the ascendant Qing Dynasty Manchus who semi-managed western coastal Taiwan until the arrival of the Japanese in 1895 – and after them the en-masse arrival of the defeated Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang, or KMT) in 1949. Indeed Taiwan’s lesser known indigenous history informs not only the title of the book, but much of the substance of it.

As for the roll call of would-be masters of Taiwan – that oft recited progression of Formosa’s travails – the irony is that none has prevailed.

The author implies this rather than dwelling on it, instead concentrating on telling the tale at length with a story-teller’s gift for details that bring dull recitation of historical dates to life. On, for example, the tussle between the Japanese and the Dutch over Taiwan in the first decade of the 1600s—amid pleas for intervention by the Chinese Ming Dynasty—Clements writes:

In 1609 … the king of the Ryukyu Islands sent a letter to the Chinese emperor, complaining about samurai interference in his country, and claiming that he had recently refused a Japanese request for soldiers to help them in a putative invasion of Taiwan. In 1616, the king sent another letter, warning the Chinese that the lord of Nagasaki was planning to send a fleet of 13 ships to establish a trading base on Taiwan. Only three of them reached Taiwan, where they were soon shooed away. A far more dangerous presence in the area was that of the Dutch East India Company … founded in 1602 as a result of European tensions, as a new front in the war of the Netherlands against Spain. Within two years, the first documented Dutch vessel had reached Taiwan …

Actually, the vessel had reached Penghu, then known as the Pescadores, which the Ming considered Chinese territory. Eventually, writes Clements, an envoy arrived from the Ming Emperor, instructing the Dutch they were unwelcome on the Chinese territory, but they could ply their trade beyond the Emperor’s jurisdiction. The Dutch wrote at the time:

If we wished to go to the island of Formosa, and to fortify ourselves there, the king would have no objection …

The rest is history, one might suggest, except for that that troublesome buried history before it and the fact that the tales of conquest and revolt build upon each other to the point that Taiwan’s provenance is as confusing and numerous as its languages.

After all, even the idea that Taiwan is a predominantly Mandarin speaking turns out to be a gloss on a mercurial dynamic. Clements writes:

The 1.7 per cent of the population that today identify as indigenous speak at least one of 16 surviving Austronesian languages; to confound the historian, another dozen indigenous languages have died out in the last couple of centuries. The idea that Taiwan is a ‘Mandarin-speaking’ island is a political decree, issued in the 1940s by the refugee KMT government, and enshrined in 1953 in a strict educational policy. That, in turn, was at least partly designed to stamp out Japanese, the lingua franca of Taiwanese culture and civil life for the first four decades of the 20th century, and still a shibboleth that pops up in local slang.

Essentially, Taiwan, or Formosa, was a problem case long before the PRC’s foreign minister, accused Taiwan President Lai Ching-te of betraying the nation and its “ancestors.”

It took the Qing Dynasty 40 years to mop up the remnants of Ming Dynasty loyalists who had retreated to the island, proclaiming it part of the empire in 1644 and semi-making it so in 1683. The Japanese made shorter shrift of things when they made Taiwan the first stop in their empire in the making, but they were still suppressing “savages” until they lost WWII …

With an ‘incident’ of some sort roughly every 30 hours, year after year, and periodic escalations requiring a more involved military response, the Japanese military began making pre-emptive plans. Administrator Mochiji Rokusaburō issued a chilling Report Concerning the Governing of Savages (1903), advising a more active genocide against the indigenous peoples, on the grounds that they barely counted as human beings.

Taiwan, which to this day sees brawls in its parliament, has never been for the faint of heart. A common saying during the Qing administration was: “Of every ten who reached Taiwan, just three remain; six are dead and one has returned home.”

Small wonder the author’s fascination with Taiwan’s liminal status, and arguably – although the headhunters and the malaria have been banished – that continues to be Taiwan’s distinction: a technology powerhouse without the right to call itself a country – a Ghost Nation as an upcoming book on Taiwan by Chris Horton calls it.

Flying its flag high, thumbing its nose David-like at its towering neighbor across the strait, the would-be occupier plots its next provocation, intent on stamping out any last ounce of rebellion Taiwan has left. History – and “Rebel Island'“s account of it, suggests that it will only yield at great cost.

‘The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan’

Matt Pottinger (Editor)

• Publisher: ‎ Hoover Press (July, 2024)

• Print length: ‎ 266 pages

• ASIN : ‎ B0CX9N23XL

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0817926465

“THE BOILING MOAT” is premised on the idea that there’s a point at which China assesses that the risks involved in annexing Taiwan outweigh the gains – and it folds. None of the writers in this collection of essays seems ready to concede that Beijing has talked so big about Taiwan’s centrality to Xi Jinping’s vision of the “great revival or rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” that a no-show on invasion day is unacceptable.

Questions such as “Can we afford it?” or “What if we lose?” are likely to suggest a traitorous lack of zeal.

Edited by Matt Pottinger, former Asia director on the National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term as president, “The Boiling Moat” acknowledges Beijing’s ideological fervor:

More than once, Xi has described unification with Taiwan as a prerequisite for achieving his broader objectives for China on the world stage, a vision he calls ‘the Chinese dream for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’ In a 2017 address to the 19th Party Congress in Beijing, Xi said that ‘complete national unification is an inevitable requirement for realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’

In short, China – a nation that trades in nationalism, has no truck with international law, and sees itself as driven by destiny – is set on “bringing Taiwan home” by hook or by crook. “The Boiling Moat” acknowledges this as well:

… Whereas Xi’s more immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, framed war as something Beijing would wage in response to a declaration of independence by Taiwan, official propaganda under Xi has gone further by suggesting that force may be used to compel unification, not just to respond to a Taiwanese bid for formal independence.

Since taking power in 2012, the escalation of pressure on Taiwan has been dramatic and systematic. But it’s been particularly evident since the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to power under Tsai Ing-wen in 2016.

Beginning that year, China conducted military drills around Taiwan with increasing frequency. By 2023, China spent about US$15 billion, or 7% of its defense budget – roughly 85% of Taiwan’s entire annual defense budget – on exercises in the Western Pacific alone. In 2019, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) warplanes crossed the so-called median line between the PRC and the ROC (the Republic of China, as Taiwan is otherwise known) and have subsequently continued to do so unabated.

The number of such incursions has increased from 240 crossings in 2021 to 269 in 2022, 271 in 2023, and 313 in 2024, according to the Jamestown Foundation, opening what experts call a “new normal.” Today, PLA warplanes enter Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) more than 245 times a month, according to Taiwan’s defense ministry.

The pattern is clear: Xi has transformed what were occasional, symbolic military activities into regular, sophisticated, and increasingly realistic rehearsals for invasion or blockade – all while spending massive resources to demonstrate China's growing capability and resolve.

As the Financial Times reminds us in a recent report:

Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific command, in February said it was “very close” to the point where the “fig leaf of an exercise” could mask preparations for an attack.

“The Boiling Moat” acknowledges this, pointing out that the PRC will make its move when it’s ready.

In Chapter 3, “The Myth of Accidental Wars,” which makes every impression of standing as the book’s mission statement, the authors (Matt Pottinger and Matthew Turpin, former US National Security Council member and co-author of “Silicon Triangle”) write:

Western diplomats and journalists reflexively assume more hotlines and communication channels with Beijing are a key to preventing a mishap from spiraling into war. What they fail to recognize is that if war follows a military mishap, it wouldn’t be because of a misunderstanding. Quite the opposite: it would be because Beijing has made a deliberate decision that the time is advantageous to fight a war it has spent decades equipping and rehearsing for [emphasis added]. Leaders start wars when they believe war will pay strategic dividends that couldn’t be obtained through peaceful means—not because their anger got the better of them on a particular afternoon or because they couldn’t find a working phone number for the White House.

The answer, write Pottinger and Turpin, is deterrence.

Geography affords Taiwan and its defenders an advantage that precludes the need to match the People’s Liberation Army ship for ship, warplane for warplane, and rocket for rocket. Taiwan’s relative lack of suitable landing beaches, its mountainous coastline, and the hundred-mile-wide Taiwan Strait (something Ukrainians can only envy) are favorable ingredients for cooking up another Cold War–style “offset.” Provided that Taiwan and the United States—together with its allies—have the means to turn the Taiwan Strait into a “boiling moat,” deterrence can prevail. The chapters that follow explain how.

The chapters that follow, do indeed attempt to do that. “The Boiling Moat” is replete with exhortations and should-dos, if the US, Taiwan and its regional neighbors want to avoid Taiwan disappearing into the maw of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-ruled China. But those chapters also beg the question, what if deterrence doesn’t work? What if the PLA goes ahead and sucker punches Taiwan with no warning and before it can mobilize, catching the US and Japan off guard?

Just as scarily, what if the deterrence “The Boiling Moat” so urgently calls for Taiwan to be provided simply isn’t available?

In March this year, US President Donald Trump called on Taiwan to up its defense spending to 10% of GDP. The proposal was dismissed in Taiwan, not least because, as noted in the local press:

Taiwan would have to spend NT$2.6 trillion (US$81.7 billion) per year on the defense budget to meet Trump’s demand, even though it only has a total annual budget of NT$3 trillion.

In short, 10% would bankrupt the government.

Meanwhile, ironically the backlog of US arms due to be delivered to Taiwan stands at US$21.54 billion. It’s a number that has been building since 2019. Put it down to American industrial capacity being overextended by arms shipments to Ukraine defending itself against Russia and to Israel for its offensive in Gaza. Add to it supply chain issues from COVID-19 and general production bottlenecks in the US defense industry.

So-called big-ticket items – F-16s and Abrams tanks – account for more than 50 percent of the value, but the backlog also includes arms systems and resources for asymmetric battle, which Taiwan is increasingly turning to its own technology know-how to accomplish.

Just days ago, in an interview with Taiwan Defense Minister Wellington Koo, the Wall Street Journal noted that Taiwan is commissioning its “first-ever army drone units this year” and introducing “sea drones to its naval forces, part of its efforts to modernize its arsenal with cutting-edge technology to prepare for a potential Chinese invasion …

The steps fit into a shift from a focus on traditional forces to building up its capabilities intended to make China think twice before attacking. Taiwan’s marines have already transformed some tank and artillery battalions into drone squads, according to Koo.

“It would be best if China wakes up every day feeling like ‘today’s just not the day to invade,’” he said.

To be sure, Taiwan will continue to seek to purchase arms from the US for its defense, but even Newsweek gets that it’s as much about “currying favor” as obtaining an instant fix for the threat of China.

In the meantime, Xi has been restructuring the PLA’s command structure and its units since 2015, with an emphasis on smaller, more flexible units, as China continues to master joint operations – all with the aim of reducing conversion time for attack to a minimum – hours ideally.

Yet, despite all the rehearsals and incessant training, taking Taiwan is a toweringly tall order for an untested military such as China’s especially as modern warfare changes before our eyes. Hopefully, the best deterrence of all – as Xi continues to purge PLA generals, reportedly for corruption and “violating political discipline” – is China itself.

Note to readers: Apologies for the extraordinary delay in putting out this issue. I’ve had business to attend to, as well as some personal issues. ChinaDiction will return on a far more regular basis from now on. Next up: “Granta 169: China.”

‘Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law’

Jerome A. Cohen

• Publisher: ‎ Columbia University Press (March 4, 2025)

• Print length: ‎ 384 pages

• ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0231215923

A CONSUMMATE LAWYER, Jerome A. Cohen is not one to start proceedings with a bang. In “Eastwards, Westwards,” the scholar, ad-hoc diplomat and towering figure in the development of rule of law in East Asia knows where he’s going, but he’s going to do procedurally—and conversationally.

Early in the book, he writes:

I was about to turn thirty and confronted my most daring career decision … less than two years earlier, I had rejected the suggestion of UCLA’s law dean, who said, ‘Somebody should study the law of Red China,’ as many Americans still called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1958. I had even turned down an offer from the University of Michigan Law School that I replace a retiring professor whose specialties included the legal systems of France and Germany.

Anyone who’s aware of Cohen knows he’s going to reconsider the UCLA law dean’s China suggestion and blaze a trail of glory through the legal field with a focus on China—indeed, with a presence in some of the most pivotal moments in Sino-U.S. relations.

And, that’s the problem.

The reader looking for insights into Cohen’s role in some of those moments should expect much page flipping through domesticity and matters relating to Harvard academia before getting to the meat of the meal. On the other hand, the reader who revels in semi-modestly delivered tales of a charmed rise in a chosen career, rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in American politics and academia, of the following kind:

All in all, the first year in academic life had proved busy and satisfying. I had gradually developed into a decent teacher, thanks in part to critical student reactions. I seemed to be accepted by the faculty, even if not warmly embraced. I loved the Bay Area and the environment and, in the autumn, came to enjoy the surprisingly hot Saturday afternoons at the Cal football stadium. We loved our rented house and its setting and ended up, through great fortune, being able to buy the house next door for a modest price! It needed a front deck to take advantage of the Bay view, and Joan wanted to have a spiral staircase leading up to it from the street. We asked our old friend from college days John Field, who was already acquiring architectural recognition, to help us, and he did a splendid job turning what had been a rather ordinary Spanish-style structure into an open, attractive residence.

That’s a glimpse of the long, chatty treat of a prelude you have in store.

And it’s also the last you’re going to hear about Cohen’s picture-perfect domestic tranquility and untarnished professional fulfillment from this reviewer, because after a mere 150 pages or so of it, Cohen’s life starts to intersect with history and become genuinely interesting.

When does it start? It’s the summer of 1963, Berkeley has prepared him for fieldwork, and it’s the final year of a four-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Cohen decides to spend it—family in tow—interviewing Chinese refugees in Hong Kong.

“That was as close as most Americans could get to mainland China at that time,” he remarks, adding:

… My timing was good. We arrived in Hong Kong in early August 1963. In the spring of 1962, for a period of about six weeks, the PRC had suddenly let down the barriers that had made it difficult for Chinese to reach Hong Kong without official permission. This enabled roughly sixty thousand people who, in an effort to escape the starvation and other miseries of the Great Leap Forward’s aftermath, had been massing near Hong Kong’s border with Guangdong Province to enter the colony. Many more would have joined them had the colony not later closed the border to prevent utter inundation by the refugee wave that had overwhelmed its facilities.

Next to nothing was known at the time about China’s legal system and Cohen is determined to find out as much as he can. Was adultery a crime, and if so was it prosecuted? To which, one of his interlocutors, a former policeman from Fuzhou, retorts":

‘Look, if we prosecuted all the cases of adultery, we wouldn’t have time for the counterrevolutionaries!’

Such was the state of the law in China at that time—wave after wave of ideologically driven arbitrary persecution. But, by luck, stumbling on a refugee with actual legal experience, Cohen also begins to learn something about the halting and rudimentary efforts underway to change that. His source joined “the Beijing equivalent of a law firm” in 1956, which Cohen describes as “an exciting period for law reformers …

Many codes of law were drafted with Soviet assistance, including drafts of what were slated to be the PRC’s first codes of criminal law and criminal procedure, and the legal advisory bureaus were expected to help experiment with and implement these drafts. But the effort came to a sudden end in June 1957, when the outpouring of criticisms elicited by the Hundred Flowers Campaign stunned party leaders and led Chairman Mao to unleash the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

Drafting of codes of law comes to a close, Cohen’s source’s law firm closes and the source escapes to Hong Kong after being declared a “rightist.” Cohen’s “exciting period for law reformers” is buried after little more than a year. And, as it happens, a year marks the end of Cohen’s active engagement with China—and for many pages to come. Readers urging the autobiographer, Come one, tell us all about Nixon and Kissinger and Zhou Enlai and Mao are going to have to wait.

Cohen is unflappable when it comes to making his audience wait, just as he is when it comes to all that is so difficult comprehend and justify about the rise of modern China.

Apart from the much noted “conversational” tone to Cohen’s work, there’s a less-remarked-upon folksy optimism both in his chosen mission and in his regard for China itself. He hints at some of the terrible stories he hears in Hong Kong from victims of unnecessary purges, but he never throws up his hands and says, This self-obsessed, one-party state is never going to establish a legal system that can act in the interests of anything or anyone other than the party and the interests of the leaders who pretend to serve it. The same is true later in the book—Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo never even rates a mention and when basically every lawyer with any interest in human rights in China has been incarcerated, Cohen has other issues to discuss.

Cohen is avowedly a believer in the “pendulum”—the word comes up often—of Chinese history. China goes into a state of irrational crisis, and then the pendulum swings back and the Chinese reemerge as the brilliant, hardworking and friendly people they really are.

Presumably, even if they accidentally start WWIII by attempting to seize a chunk of the first island chain or all of the the South China Sea, they’ll inevitably dust themselves off sooner or later, reinvent gunpowder and start again.

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But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because after leaving Hong Kong and returning to the US, engagement with China is never far from Cohen’s mind and by 1966 he’s leaning to the view that improved “Sino-American relations might lead to an acceptable way of ending our mistaken Vietnam involvement …

The challenge was how to bring about such an improvement after almost two decades of hostility and while China was in the throes of an unprecedented Cultural Revolution that was wreaking havoc on its foreign affairs as well as its domestic governance.

No shit, as the Americans say.

But by 1969, Richard Nixon has come to power, and with him Cohen’s Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger—for non-Americans, ”Eastward, Westward” is, if nothing else, a fascinating insight into the sheer golden-carpet power of a Harvard law degree .

Cohen and fellow believers (members of the Kennedy Institute) “had agreed on a thoughtful, balanced draft containing about a dozen recommendations [on China],” Cohen writes.

Our first recommendation called on the new president to dispatch the new secretary of state to Beijing to conduct secret, if need be deniable, conversations with the Chinese leadership in order to explore possibilities of a thaw. Shortly after … [Nixon’s] victory, however, when he appointed our Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger to be his national security adviser, we altered the draft’s first recommendation so that Henry might qualify for the mission.

So begins Kissinger’s long and profitable relationship with the Middle Kingdom—Cohen makes no comment on the less savory aspects of his Harvard fellow’s reputation. Cohen merely remarks that Kissinger was initially coy about his China mission, stressing “with Chinese modesty how little he knew about China.” But this begins to change “after he returned from the secret meeting with Zhou Enlai in Beijing in July 1971.”

Of course, the Kissinger visit is prelude to Nixon’s historic eight days in China in February 1972, meeting Chairman Mao and signing the Shanghai Communiqué—marking the first step to normalization of US-China relations and recognition of the “One China,” policy, which allowed sustained unofficial relations with Taiwan.

The rest is history, one might say, except that—Jimmy Carter officially granting China full diplomatic recognition and severing normal ties with Taiwan in 1979 aside—Cohen, whose drive is a slap in the face to anyone who imagines themselves more than averagely productive, still has much to achieve.

For a start, why not the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea? Surely the so-called “Hermit Kingdom” deserves a legal system—or at least somebody should go and dig to find out what passes for one there.

Writes the indefatigable Cohen;

… My interest was enhanced, of course, by the excitement of breaking new ground. A dozen years earlier I had been motivated by the desire to be a pioneer, to break new academic and legal ground by becoming America’s first specialist in contemporary Chinese law and government. That offered the opportunity to promote a reconciliation between the American and Chinese people too long separated by China’s civil war and revolution and the Korean conflict. Now suddenly this quest had created a new chance for adventure and a useful contribution, one that I had never considered: opening up relations with the mysterious and potentially dangerous Hermit Kingdom that was even more isolated from the world community than China.

He adds:

Our family would only be the third group of Americans ever permitted by both the DPRK and the United States to set foot in North Korea. No American diplomats, officials, congressional representatives, businesspeople, academics, athletic figures, entertainers, or others had ever legally preceded us. This opportunity was irresistible.

By 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Cohen steps back from the limelight and returns to practicing law, explaining:

Any aspirations I might still have had to take part in diplomacy or other government service relating to China were put on hold because I had neither Republican inclinations nor connections.

This is far from the end of the “Eastwards, Westwards.”’ story. Cohen joins Paul, Weiss Partnership, which clearly involves a lot of work and a lot of name-dropping, including even Mia Farrow for reasons not worth going into. Meanwhile, his law firm dispatches Cohen to Hong Kong, where Lord Kadoorie, (“whom I called Lawrence”) drops him a bombshell of a job—consulting for China Light & Power (CLP) in a joint venture worth US$3.5 billion for the construction and operation of China’s first nuclear power plant. He later organizes pandas for New York Bronx zoo through the innovative solution (“my idea”) of leasing them via the Chinese Wildlife Foundation.

Somewhere along the way, Cohen lectures a relatively youthful Zhu Rongji on fair business trade and of course they become friends, and later Zhu becomes the force behind China’s entry into the WTO.

The fact that China has never truly abided by its rules is ignored.

Perhaps that note is the point to pause and reflect on why much of the tale end of “Eastward, Westward” is a measured plea for understanding. Cohen is clearly rattled by the events of June 4 1989—what some call the Tiananmen Massacre—and it comes as a surprise when he openly muses on the question asked by some as to whether “those of us who sought to … improve the legal system of the PRC” were not simply wasting our time, but “like Dr. Frankenstein” creating a monster?

Cohen’s answers are both logically coherent and naively wishful. He concludes with the debatable—and, as I say, somewhat naively wishful—contention:

Despite the impact of June 4, some important legal reforms were achieved in the two decades between Deng Xiaoping’s famous 1992 southern tour and the ascent to power of Xi Jinping in late 2012. Even today, some improvements in the formal judicial system continue to be made amid ever increasing party and police oppression.

Cohen knows that in today’s China rule by law in the interests of the party has erased any pretense of rule of law and that China has become a far more effectively repressive machine by means of its legal system, such as it is. But, he writes:

On political grounds, I feel no guilt or regret about the years spent cooperating with the PRC during the halcyon days of the largely optimistic 1980s prior to the massacre of June 4. Nor am I doubtful about the desirability of continuing that cooperation today, as our New York University (NYU) School of Law U.S.-Asia Law Institute (USALI) and other foreign institutions struggle to do.

Ever the optimist, Cohen builds on his upbeat feelings:

One of the PRC’s most popular songs has been ‘Tomorrow Will Be Even Better.’ Because I am an inveterate optimist, I have often referred to it in China when ending lectures that were critical of current practices. I am not as depressed as many of my fellow foreign China-watchers are.

At its worst, “Eastward Westward” might be described as a chatty high-fiving account of US diplomatic successes from one of the self-convinced good guys. For some it will be that too often Cohen’s busy-do-gooding and ensuring his next career enhancement when the Chinese government clearly has a none-too-hidden agenda that is anathema not just to what the West represents but what Cohen himself is most proud to represent.

At its best, well, there’s no denying that Cohen has led a full and productive life during interesting times—in both the best and worst senses—and “Eastward, Westwards” shares some of that with the patient, non-overly judgmental reader.

‘The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China’

Perry Link

• Publisher: ‎ Paul Dry Books (February 18, 2025)

• Print length: ‎ 372 pages

• ASIN‏: ‎ B0DW4HMLX2

IF THE TITLE tells you nothing else – and nobody can deny that the title is less than revealing – Anaconda doesn’t shout out: “Everything you wanted to know about China but were afraid to ask.”

But, then again, at least for this reader, Anaconda comes as a relief from some of the tomes that arrive with an agenda: The Coming China Century/Collapse, China’s Long Game, AI and Chopsticks, etc – that kind of thing (and apologies if you actually wrote one of those books; I’m sure it had to be done).

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Perry Link, a sinologist and professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside, and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, brings a mostly light, conversational tone to a diverse array of subjects grouped under four China categories: “Captive China,” “Learning,” “Teachers,” and “Day Job Joys.”

Yes, the categories are less than promising – that’s another thing that cannot be denied – but somehow they deliver far more than they appear to advertise. As for the essays, they’ve all been published elsewhere. But apart from the contributions that have run in, say, The New York Review of Books, many will be new even to the most zealous China watchers.

There are only one or two of the essays that can be described as less than engaging – and that’s only because most of Link’s observations require more than a passing interest in China. For the average reader that does not, for example, include the translatability of Tang Dynasty poetry.

(Personally, I think the chapter on poetry is one of the best in the book; I’m flagging it for those who will possibly disagree.)

Much of the time, Link’s approach is to engage with an issue that’s broadly agreed upon and then pick it apart and come up with an angle that casts the subject in a fresh light. Take the gunboat diplomacy that swept Qing Dynasty China into the global arena, foisting “newness” – and collapse – on the dynasty in the process:

To China the West seemed to say, “Catch up or perish.” How to modernize became a Chinese obsession that led to many things, including the fevered contortions that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has put the country through over the past seventy years. One way to measure China’s urge to transform itself is to note how often the word new has been used by Chinese leaders. In 1902 the concept of the “new citizen” took hold in Liang Qichao’s New Citizen Journal. Twenty years later the May Fourth Movement came to be known as the New Culture Movement. Its seminal magazine was called New Youth. In 1934 Chiang Kai-shek launched his New Life Movement. The Communist takeover in 1949 was the advent of New China, and the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s touted a “new socialist man.” After Mao Zedong died in 1976, the next few years were called “the new period.” Today, Xi Jinping’s watchword is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It is important to note that new in these cases never refers to the same thing; each is a new new.

The tragedy, in Link’s view, is the way in which – particularly in CCP centrally-governed China – the zeal for new upon yet new new has led to ill-conceived shortcuts followed by crashes. Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to an estimated 30 million deaths by starvation. His Cultural Revolution, which aimed for the Chinese people to “make revolution in the depths of your soul” and “love Chairman Mao more than your parents,” led to mass violence, murder and the physical demolition of much of China’s culture – some 6,000 temples in Tibet alone, and, yes, Tibet was not even China until it was made so by invasion in 1950. Meanwhile, don’t forget:

Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy, intended in the late 1970s to jump-start a modern economy, led by the late 2010s to problems in labor supply and elder support sufficiently severe as to require abrupt reversals.

Let’s not forget, while we’re at it, that Xi JInping has brought the emergence of the “new era for socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or national rejuvenation, and perhaps reordering the global order while he’s at it – forward to 2035. It was originally slated for 2050.

Such introductory material doesn’t represent Link’s book perfectly overall. Anaconda is a slippery book to pin down, something of a critique by stealth of the impossibility of China becoming what the CCP dreams of. That is most evident in the tortured struggles that Link depicts taking place in literature, the arts, in the realm of human rights and even in obscure cultural sectors such as the traditional comedic form or xiangsheng (xiàng shěng, 相声), usually translated as “cross talk.”

But Anaconda does all the above while not holding back on calling a spade a spade. On post-Tiananmen CCP rule of China, Link writes:

In the post-massacre 1990s, as the top leaders dropped even the pretense of interacting with society, they turned to a pillaging of the Chinese economy that resembled guandao [official corruption] but dwarfed it. High-ranking officials lopped off great chunks of the economy—electricity, IT, banking, shipping—and placed control in the hands of their own families, who then raked in stupendous wealth. This pattern seeped downward as they essentially said to those under them, “We give you license to plunder as long as you prevent ‘trouble’ by keeping the lid on in your area.”

It is at this point that Link’s essays turn towards the dissident – or simply intellectual – critics that give the lie to Beijing’s projection of confidence. In an essay on the prominent Chinese writer, filmmaker and professional racing driver Han Han, who as early as the 1990s attempted to stand up for China’s maligned youth:

He defends China’s young people who are not always vocal about justice from the charge, which their elders sometimes level, that they are materialistic and do not “care about politics.” Han answers that the older generation has a horrific record of being knocked around by politics, but being [that kind of] victim is no decent topic of conversation, any more than being raped has a place in a proper range of sexual experiences. The era when one can care about politics has yet to arrive …

Han observes that, in officialese, statements about the people supporting the government are not empirical claims but true by definition. This is because anyone who withholds support automatically is not one of the “people” but some other category—“reactionary,” “bad element,” or whatever. He argues that, to ordinary Chinese, the “news” in the official media, even if it is true, always seems phony after its official packaging, because of its official packaging. But—and here his remarkable perspicacity appears again—that doesn’t matter, because the regime does not ask credence from its citizens, only the pretense of credence … Han goes on to argue that the Party actually prefers that people not be too sincere about loving the Party. After all, where might that lead? To cleaning up corruption? To telling the truth?

There’s too much packed into Link’s collection to go through it essay by essay and it’s too diverse to summarize. But in essence, Anaconda takes on, in lucid, measured prose, the issues that Link obviously sees as worthy of discussion – both good and bad.

Of course, turned away at the border in Beijing in 1996, Link is barred from visiting China – but precisely for what reasons he himself can only guess … as he writes in a previously unpublished essay, “Life on a Blacklist:”

Which of my “errors” might be the one that precipitated the regime’s decision? I had written about censorship and repression in China, had translated dissident writers, and had joined human rights groups. But exactly what line had I crossed, and where?

He’s phlegmatic about his blacklisted status:

I miss China’s life on the ground: the sounds, sights, and smells of the streets, the charming snacks that can be had there, and the lively, authentic speech. My 2013 book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics is about contemporary Chinese language and draws examples not only from published writing but also from T-shirts, graffiti, slang, jokes, and other ephemera that I could collect easily during times I spent in China but since then can gather only second hand. I also miss face-to-face encounters with writers, scholars, activists, booksellers, and people on the street.

All the same, most of the commentary in this book has been written and published since Link was blacklisted. It’s far easier for us today to observe and comment from afar, in nonattendance, and Link is probably as in touch with China as he might have been reporting from the streets of Beijing. There are even benefits, writes Link:

Blacklisting leaves a person freer than before. This is because once a blacklisting happens, the fear that it might happen disappears. After all it is dread of the event—not the event itself—that causes people to self-censor. Relieved of the pressure, it becomes much easier to say what one thinks. My favorite expression of this principle is the Chinese farmers’ proverb sizhu bupa kaishui tang “dead pigs aren’t afraid of hot water” …

In 2015 the Dalai Lama was interested in having a small meeting with American China scholars, and the scholars whom the Dalai Lama’s office approached showed strong interest. But the question of who would host the meeting became a problem; to do it would be to risk blacklisting. Someone called me to see whether I could help. I would not need to raise money or do any organizing—just be the official host. I agreed. Why not? A second death would be redundant.

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That first death has no doubt given Link the freedom to write some of the pages in this book: his passionate support of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who died a prisoner of conscience in 2017, for example.

In a memorable passage, Link even compares the Nobel Prize winner with Xi Jinping:

The two were separated in age by only two years. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution both missed school and were banished to remote places. Xi used the time to begin building a resume that would allow him, riding the coattails of his elite-Communist father, to one day vie for supreme power; Liu used the time to read on his own and learn to think for himself. One mastered the techniques of betrayal and sycophancy that a person needs to rise within a closed system; the other learned to challenge received wisdom of every kind, keeping for himself only the ideas that could pass the test of rigorous independent examination. For one of them, value was measured by power and position; for the other, by moral worth. In their final standoff, one “won,” the other “lost.” But two hundred years from now, who will recall the names of the tyrants who sent Mandela and Havel to jail? Will the glint of Liu Xiaobo’s incisive intellect be remembered, or the cardboard mediocrity of Xi’s?

Elsewhere, on the subject of “Liu’s stout independence,” Link writes:

In the 1980s, while still a graduate student in Chinese literature, he was already known as a “dark horse” for denouncing nearly every contemporary Chinese writer: the literary star Wang Meng was politically slippery; “roots-seeking” writers like Han Shaogong were excessively romantic about the value of China’s traditions; even speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to pin hopes on “liberal” Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang. No one was independent enough. “I can sum up what’s wrong with Chinese writers in one sentence,” Liu Xiaobo wrote in 1986. “They can’t write creatively themselves—they simply don’t have the ability—because their very lives don’t belong to them.”

Amid the controversy – in some quarters – that erupted when the Chinese novelist Mo Yan was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, Link felt free to let it be known that he thought that when Mo touched on catastrophic episodes like the Great Leap famine, “he deflects attention from true horrors by resorting to what I called ‘daft hilarity’” … while making no mention of starvation that cost thirty million or more lives.

On whether Mo, who defended CCP censorship in his acceptance speach, should have been awarded the Prize, Link provides a list of writers whom he considers truly deserving, Mo is not among them.

When a deadly virus began seeping out of Wuhan, Link against a grain that was taking shape worldwide despite the lack of an intermediate species culprit (we still haven’t found one), spoke out on the origins of the virus simply based on the language the CCP were using as they stalled on all attempts to bring about an outside inquiry:

I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a long-time student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source—or, at a minimum, fear that this is what the world will believe. Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned. Read upside-down, there is a sense in which the official press never lies. It cannot lie. It has to tell you what the Party wants you to believe, and if you can figure out the Party’s motive, which always exists, then you have a solid piece of information.

The stories far from end there, and along the way he scatters ones I’ve failed to give a nod, along with some unforgettable anecdotes.

On Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist who partly inspired the pro-democracy student movements of 1986–87 and Tiananmen Square in 1989:

When the government began using the slogan “modernization with Chinese characteristics” (i.e., modernization except for monopoly power for the Communist Party), Fang responded satirically by asking students if they believed in physics with Chinese characteristics.

In 1991, on Wan Runnan, the head of the Sitong Company who was obliged to flee China after the June Fourth massacre

“China belongs to the people of China; it is not the private property of the Communist Party.” This assertion, obvious in one sense, was unutterable during the Mao years and still sounded radical in 1991.

Oh, and in that chapter on the translatability of Tang Dynasty poetry, Eliot Weinberger, who wrote:

Confucianism taught that when the government is bad, one should head for the hills. (Taoism taught that, regardless of the government, one should head for the hills).

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, just say “yes,” urge the inquisitors, “and everything will be alright.”

And as for that anaconda in the chandelier – it’s there, insatiable in its quest for digestible victims, winding and unwinding with barely a flicker of the lights.

‘The Troublemaker’

Mark L. Clifford

• Publisher: ‎ Free Press (December 3, 2024)

• Print length: ‎ 281 pages

• Page numbers source ISBN : ‎ 1668027690

THE TROUBLEMAKER author Mark L. Clifford, who now heads the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, served on the board of Jimmy Lai’s media company, Next Digital, from 2018 to 2021. He claims to have played a role in stymying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from getting everything it wanted in Hong Kong and he was part of the fight against the Party doing that.

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Clifford first met Lai in 1993, and his sprawling array of sources has made it possible for him assemble a narrative that credibly chips away at some of the enigmatic veneer that makes Lai probably the least scrutable dissident – if that is indeed what he is – to ever take on China’s totalitarian regime.

Lai was born in 1947 (approximately) in Shunde, Guangdong Province. They were hard-scrabble times. The country was yet to see an end to the civil war that drove the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1949, and soon it would be clawing its way out of economic isolation imposed by its involvement in the Korean War. It was also – by way of a historically unique road to economic recovery – poised to make a succession of gargantuan blunders courtesy of Chairman Mao Zedong’s maniacal social experiments.

The boy, Lai, for whom barbecued field mice were a rare culinary treat and who had to hustle the streets for pocket change to feed himself, wriggling his way to the heights of odd portering jobs at the Hong Kong border town of Lo Wu was a heady achievement.

“I became one of the privileged people, so to speak,” [Jimmy said later] having at the age of eight or nine ingratiated himself with the gang bosses who controlled work at the station.

But then, as Clifford repeatedly reminds us, Lai, from an extremely young age, felt destined for greatness. It was bestowed upon him by his father before the elder Lai deserted his family for Hong Kong. Lai the younger took to foraging for cigarette butts, and re-rolling the contents into cigarettes. The story of how he got from there to billionaire wealth in Hong Kong, is truly riveting, Dickensian stuff and one of the best sections of the book.

At 12, Lai escapes to Hong Kong and sleeps wherever he can in the factories that pay him a pittance for his endless hours of work. But he still knows, despite the hardships – he loses the tip of a finger in a machine accident and his hearing in one ear due to lack of protective tooling gear – he’s launched a new future for himself.

It is a new place to me, the people, their values are all new to me, even their clean beaches are new to me. I come from a very dirty place. Not only the streets, the air, the politics, but also the way that people think are all dirty. It’s not the kind of filth you would find in garbage or dirt, it’s the ugliness in those people’s hearts. Only having seen this kind of ugliness can you then know what filth is. When I looked at the new world ahead of me, I know I have arrived; I have arrived at a world where life is worth living.

Lai is double-back shifting his way up through the ranks of Hong Kong’s burgeoning manufacturing sector and almost inevitably – or so it seems in the reading – ends up with his own stake in the business at just the right moment in Hong Kong’s history.

This is one of many points in the book in which the reader might be forgiven for beginning to wonder whether Lai really is the stuff of which social movements are made. He’s far from a labor activist but he has also barely attended school and is very much, especially in these early Hong Kong years, the capitalist autodidact.

Courting American buyers in search of low-cost suppliers, Lai’s first encounters with ideas of any kind appear to be let-the-market-decide legends like Friedrich Hayek (famously the author of The Road to Serfdom) and “free markets, monetarism and minimal government intervention” Milton Friedman, whom Lai was later to befriend.

Lai even, as he grows ever richer after moving into the retail sector with his Giordano brand – in a period of his life that the Clifford elides as if it were a cocktail evening gone somewhat astray – starts to enjoy the kinds of extravagances suggestive of roadsigns and guideposts to sanity disappearing in a trail of dust:

A chauffeured gold Rolls-Royce ferried him into town. Lai had a miniature zoo that included peacocks, a flying fox, deer, a monkey, and a pet bear who liked to drink cream soda. Once, Lai wrestled with the bear as it tried to escape, and got scratched up in the process … He invited friends over to take saunas and cold plunges and smoke weed as they looked across the majestic harbor toward the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island.

On that note – and no judgement, other than to point out that it was and still is highly illegal in Hong Kong – quite a lot of weed smoking goes on in Lai’s chase-the-money heyday. But ultimately he would restlessly begin seeking more from life than spliffs, peacocks and ice-cream-soda-guzzling pet bears.

Firstly, in what turned out to be a brilliant career move, Lai moved from manufacturing sweaters for the US mass market to retailing his own garments via the Giordano brand name – a name inspired by an Italian restaurant where he ate a pizza in New York. In the process, Lai revolutionized retail fashion.

To avoid getting stuck with excess stock in slow-moving colors, he made everything in white and dyed the items when orders came in. This inverted the traditional clothes-making method of using dyed fabric to make clothes. It also dramatically reduced the amount of unsold clothes. If lime-green was selling and orange wasn’t, Giordano would dye a lot of lime-green clothes—and avoid getting stuck with orange ones. “Simplicity became the theme. Every day I ask myself, “Can I make it simpler, can I make it cheaper, can I make it better?”

Lai had, as Clifford puts it, “pioneered fast fashion” and was even courted with a 30% share of a Japanese fast-fashion startup called Uniqlo. Lai, who had an aversion to partnerships, turned down the offer, and the Uniqlo founder, Tadashi Yanai, went on to become one of Japan’s richest men.

But these were busy times, change was in the air and something was afoot in China.

That something was to evolve over the early months of 1989 into what soon became simply known as Tiananmen – the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as the grand square in the heart of imperial Beijing is called.

The students protesting in Tiananmen Square inspired Lai. In his early years, he had not enjoyed the luxury of engaging in politics. Politics in China had shattered his family and destroyed his childhood. Lai felt something between embarrassment and shame when he thought of his homeland. He had turned his back on China in the 1960s and 1970s as he worked to get ahead in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people rallied in support of Beijing’s protesters. In 1988, a crowd of a few thousand people was considered a large pro-democracy rally. In May 1989, a million people marched to government headquarters on Hong Kong Island; pro-communist groups walked alongside pro-democracy ones. The colony witnessed a spring of unprecedented democratic ferment. Lai looked for a way to demonstrate his sympathy. He boosted Giordano’s edgy reputation and the pro-democracy movement’s coffers by raising $122,000 from the sale of more than 23,000 T-shirts.

Clifford has a lot to say about what happened in the years that followed: how Lai ventured from fast fashion to “fast news,” first.

In 1990, Lai launched “Next” – “a weekly magazine advocating for free markets and democracy alongside gossip and business news.” That in turn, years later, led to the founding of the daily Apple newspaper, first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan. But the author clearly sees the events of June 4, 1989, in Beijing as the catalyst for the truly profound changes in Lai’s world, writing:

“I didn’t feel anything about China until Tiananmen Square happened. Suddenly it was like my mother was calling me in the darkness of the night and my heart opened up” … Something changed inside Lai during those fateful, emotionally charged months in the spring of 1989. The route China charted after the killings would disappoint the hopes of many, both in Hong Kong and in China itself. Lai’s own path would, from then on, be one that publicly and defiantly put him in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

“Defiant” is the right word. In the years following the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lai was far from being a dissident in any conventional sense of the word. He was a rich businessman who, unusually, refused to be cowed by Beijing’s bluster and bullying.

When Premier Li Peng, Deng Xiaoping’s “chief hatchet man in carrying out the Tiananmen massacre, earning the premier infamy as ‘the butcher of Beijing’” visited Europe in 1994, Lai also happened to be in Europe.

The coincidence prompted Lai to write a column for his own Next Magazine that would make history and evoke the permanent visceral ire of the CCP.

… He derided the Chinese premier as “a national humiliation.” He criticized the barbarism, corruption, and decay of the Chinese Communist Party and pointed out that the party used people merely as tools, means to an end, rather seeing the worth and dignity of each individual. Lai touched on the themes of information and democracy, telling Li [Peng] that his “slave-master’s face is a laughingstock in today’s information-informed egalitarian world.” He closed his column with an emphatic throwdown to the premier: “I want to tell you that not only are you a bastard, you are also a bastard with zero IQ.” Literally, he called the premier a gui dan, or turtle egg, an everyday curse implying that the object of the curse, like a turtle, doesn’t know who his parents are.

Actually, Lai used the colloquial Chinese expression wáng bā dàn 王八蛋 (not guī dàn) – best thought of as “bastard” or “son of a bitch” multiplied by 10 in insult quotient. But his phrasing is far less important than the fact he had thrown down the gauntlet to Beijing and effectively made himself an extremely high-profile enemy of the state, as opposed to a mischievous tycoon with a multimedia megaphone.

Lai did later defend his column – as if a defense counts in Beijing – but even this column was another double-down on his disgust for China’s rulers:

“I will fight for freedom, I will not give up anticommunism, I will never give up my dignity as a human being, never will.”

They were words that were to become Lai’s credo – and to his credit he saw them through to jail, where he remains.

But in the meantime, he was still under siege as a businessman, his Giordano retail interests harried by the Chinese authorities, his media interests struggling to find printers and moneyed advertising partners. But the Apple Daily was going ahead anyway, and his rationale for the name is an early hint of the Catholicism that he was to later lean on when his world came crashing down.

Lai had “dubbed his newspaper Apple Daily, thinking of the Garden of Eden,” writes Clifford, elaborating in Lai’s words:

“Eve ate the apple,” the fruit of knowledge. “Without the apple there would be no news.” “One night after prayer,” he told Father Robert Sirico, “the idea came to me to call it ‘Apple’ because I thought if Eve did not bite the apple we would still be in heaven, there’s no need for a newspaper.”

The result was no earnest, dissident publication focused on the inequities of Hong Kong’s giant across the border. Rather, it was a frequently scurrilous celebration of Hong Kong – and best, once again, described as “defiant.”

Apple Daily was famous for its take-no-prisoners, tabloid-style approach. It was a broadsheet newspaper in size, but it had a tabloid’s scurrilous bent. “I always thought of Next as the sword and then Apple Daily was the bulldozer that drove it home,” observes Mark Simon, who served as the paper’s general manager from 2004 to 2006.

Lai bears comparison with William Randolph Hearst. As press barons, both combined sensationalism with hard-hitting reporting, banner headlines, and provocative editorial cartoons. Technology allowed Lai to take sensational journalism further than Hearst had been able to, with full-color photos of everything: car crashes, women giving birth on the street, and politicians slipping into hotels with their mistresses. Brain splatter, amputated limbs, corpses, and car crashes. Apple Daily showed them all in graphic color photos. Where Hearst pushed Americans to fight for an overseas empire, beating the drums of war during the Spanish-American War—a conflict that resulted in the United States acquiring the Philippines and Puerto Rico—Lai promoted democracy in Hong Kong. “He had everything,” says Crovitz. “Editorials that could have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, gossip that went well beyond People magazine, political coverage that was quite sophisticated, and pictures of actresses. He cared about what Hong Kong people wanted to read. He had a big advantage as a media innovator, which is that he didn’t grow up in the industry, so he could do whatever he wanted.”

But, as was the case in 1989 with Tiananmen, another sea change was upon Lai – and all of Hong Kong: this time in the form of a new national security law, which pro-Beijing politicians tried to push through in 2003.

Under the terms of the so-called one country, two systems “negotiated” by Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, China had pledged to preserve Hong Kong’s unique legal, social and business culture when the former British colony was handed over in 1997. Fifty years Beijing said it would give Hong Kong to enjoy its capitalist system – not to mention countless freedoms absent in China’s mainland cities.

Lai is said to have spent some US$1 million of his own money in catalyzing the protests that made the 2003 push to twist the Hong Kong’s legal system updside down – bringing up to 1 million people to the streets and eventually forcing the then chief executive to resign two years early.

But he was also, along with all the Hongkongers who took to the streets, been bringing themselves time. As Clifford later writes:

On June 30, 2020, China’s National People’s Congress illegally bypassed the Hong Kong legislature and imposed a sweeping National Security Law that outlawed dissent and ended the city’s freedom. The bill outlawed terrorism, subversion, secession, or collusion with a foreign government. Any criticism of the government could breach the vague new rules. Maximum penalty: life imprisonment. The law did away with jury trials, left defendants at the mercy of handpicked judges, and would ultimately be used to deny Lai his choice of lawyer. Contact with a foreign government that called for more democracy or for sanctions against Hong Kong officials was deemed to be “collusion” with foreigners and could result in conviction. The government argued, before its secretly chosen judges, that popular slogans such as “Revolution of our times” constituted secession. The law criminalized calls for democracy.

Lai quickly became one of the new law’s first targets.

On Monday, August 10, 2020, six weeks after the imposition of the new law, Lai was escorted from his home, hands handcuffed behind his back and “manhandled by the arresting officers, who bundled him into a police vehicle and drove him the ten miles to Apple Daily offices in Tseung Kwan O’s industrial park.”

Two hundred and fifty armed police had raided the building earlier that morning. They filed through the lobby, past the busts of Lai’s freedom heroes that graced the entrance—John Cowperthwaite, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. They marched up the long curving stairs from the lobby to the third-floor newsroom.

Time ran out for Lai in December 2020. On December 3, a judge ordered that his bail be revoked … Lai managed to win a short reprieve over Christmas week when a judge granted bail on December 23, though Lai remained under house arrest … On December 27, he sent a WhatsApp message to colleagues: “I’m fucked. Delete everything.”

Since his arrest four years ago, Lai has remained in prison, often in solitary confinement. He had no shortage of opportunities to escape the arm of the law before his arrest; he had no shortage of funds to support himself or of properties abroad to retreat to, but true to his word he took his Hong Kong treatment on the chin. Clifford quotes an imprisoned Lai as saying:

A young prison guard asked me, when no one was around: “Why didn’t you leave before they arrested you, for surely everybody knew that it was coming to you?” “No, I could not leave, otherwise I could not raise my head and walk tall again. I must face the consequences of my actions, just or unjust. It is also a way to uphold the dignity of Hong Kong people, as one of the leaders for the fight of freedom.

It is this latter “prison years” section of the book, which it has to be admitted is something of a slog to get through, that undoubtedly led The New York Times to call The Troublemaker …

… Hagiography in the word’s original sense: Though it does not entirely overlook Lai’s warts, it ultimately presents its subject as a kind of living saint.

There is no denying that the book belabors the “sacrifices” of Lai, a convert, late in life, to Catholicism …

Lai understands that his task is very simple: He must survive with dignity. He must remain mentally and spiritually free, and remain true to his principles. His days have the structure and simplicity of a Benedictine monk. He wakes early; he spends his day reading, meditating, and drawing, in addition to performing mandatory prison labor.

But the first three-quarters of the read make it worthwhile – and it opens up space for thought, at least in the case of this reader, as to just what is Jimmy Lai? After all, China has produced no other “troublemaker” like him.

He’s an incarcerated former billionaire, castigating himself for disappointing the Lord for killing the cockroaches that disturb his nights. He’s a reformed practical businessman who was ever sucking up the fumes of the CCP’s coming collapse, a man who was actually surprised when Xi Jinping won his third term, a man who naively believes that something as malevolent as the CCP simply has no hope of surviving, despite a lifetime of being proved wrong.

For anyone who’s eyes wide shut seen seen Chinese governance, there are no surprises in The Troublemaker: only perhaps that Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai got away with being themselves—until they didn’t.

Defiantly, with a smile—and with less moral compromise than the center can, did or will.

BEFORE WE GET INTO this week’s book review – Eva Dou’s engaging House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company – let’s pause for a moment and consider the American “TikTok refugees,” flocking to RedNote

That’s 小红书 in Chinese – once better known as Mao’s Little Red Book .

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As Rest of the World puts it:

Ahead of the short-lived U.S. TikTok ban on January 19, so-called TikTok refugees flocked to popular Chinese social media app Xiaohongshui. In the U.S., the app was number one on Apple’s App Store from January 13 to January 23, and it’s stayed in the top spot on Google Play since January 14. New data shows that the explosion in the popularity of Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, stretched well beyond U.S. borders.

A Rest of World analysis of App Store and Google Play ranking data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower found that Xiaohongshu’s popularity skyrocketed in non-Western countries, too. In 42 of the 63 non-Western countries tracked by Sensor Tower, the app ranked in the top three spots on the charts at some point between January 13 and January 21.

And it’s making people think:

For a U.S. TikTok user migrating to RedNote, the experience will be novel but not necessarily jarring. OK, there’s the “cat tax” – cat pics will win you a place in RedNote heaven – while TikTok’s all about entertainment through short, viral videos. RedNote on the other hand is a community-oriented platform with product reviews and lifestyle content. Think social media integration with e-commerce, enabling direct shopping through user recommendations – TikTok, Hey, look at me!

Another thing, for those who are used to TikTok's fast-paced and entertainment-focused environment, RedNote’s community-driven and informative nature can offer a refreshing change, particularly for those interested in beauty, fashion, and lifestyle products.

But, truth is the average Chinese RedNote user and the average American TikToker are not a match made in heaven.

And that’s the half of it. There’s a collision in the making:

Chinese internet companies and investors are increasingly caught between their authoritarian government at home,” as the New York Times recently put it, “and suspicion, even hostility, abroad.

That’s why it’s highly unlikely that RedNote, or XiaoHongShu, is going to scale the heights of popularity enjoyed by TikTok, even if TikTok wriggles out of being banned in the US. The TikTok culture and the RedNote culture are diametrically opposed to the point of being mutually exclusive. But for the time being RedNote is reportedly hard at work recruiting teams of English content moderators.

Who knows what a US- or European-educated foreigner might say left to their own devices, after all?

Over to Wired:

Social media platforms in China are legally required to remove a wide range of content, including nudity and graphic violence, but especially information that the government deems politically sensitive. Platforms like Xiaohongshu rely on large teams of contractors managed by outsourcing companies to do both routine enforcement as well as respond to emergency situations.

“RedNote—like all platforms owned by Chinese companies—is subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive laws,” wrote Allie Funk, research director for technology and democracy at the nonprofit human rights organization Freedom House, in an email to WIRED. “Independent researchers have documented how keywords deemed sensitive to those in power, such as discussion of labor strikes or criticism of Xi Jinping, can be scrubbed from the platform.”

But to be sure, China has high-speed trains and your government has been hiding them from you. Oh, and no crime or guns – in fact, China might just be heaven … Providing they can hire enough English-language content moderators to ensure that we don’t get to see too much of what’s going on in the Middle Kingdom.

Book Review

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, by Eva Dou

• ASIN: ‎ B0D6QMZZTP

• Publisher‏: ‎ Portfolio (January 14, 2025)

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 448 pages

SOME OF the most harrowing sections of House of Huawei by Eva Dou, a journalist at the Washington Post, involves Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s “wolf culture,” which can demand extraordinary sacrifices from its employees.

By that I mean, it’s not unusual for frontline staff – particularly those in the hard-boozing sales teams – to undergo punishing regimes that put them on death’s door. The reader might be forgiven for wondering whether some of them did end up being “toasted” to death –ganbei, or clink glasses, if you’ve ever been subjected to this form of torture.

The protocol … involved getting drunker than your clients to show your respect for them. One early Huawei executive wrote about having to excuse himself for a vomit break while entertaining customers—not an uncommon occurrence. Others developed stomach or liver ailments. This seemed to happen particularly often in the far northeast, which had a reputation for heavy drinking. “The key staffer for this account is currently suffering hepatitis but refuses to come back to Shenzhen for medical treatment and insists on fighting on the front line through the ice and snow,” Ren said in 1995 about a Huawei salesperson based in Yichun, close to the northeastern border with Russia.

But, then, as Dou makes clear in her very readable account of an Arbeit Über Alles telecoms giant that’s deeply intertwined with the Chinese Communist Party's interests, this is no ordinary company. It’s ownership is opaque, the government dexterously jiggles strings behind the scenes and Huawei is obligated to act in state interests.

In fact, Huawei founder Ren’s expectations of his staff remind the reader at times of Xi Jinping himself:

After Huawei made an overseas stint a requirement for promotion in 1998, it became a rite of passage for Huawei executives to do hardship postings in distant corners of the earth. When they returned to headquarters, they would swap stories from the trenches. Some had dodged bullets in war zones. Others had caught malaria or typhoid fever in swamps and hills. Or they had hobbled on frostbitten feet over desolate tundras. Some projects in sanctioned nations were cloaked in secrecy and code names. One staffer posted to Burundi reported frequent power cuts, a T-shirt shortage due to the lack of a nearby market, and a close call with a hippopotamus. Another recalled sticking it out through an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, including offering to take a customer’s sick employee to the hospital.When civil war broke out in Libya, Huawei’s staffers divided themselves into two teams so that they could keep the phones running on both sides. “We must always remember,” Ren told his staff following a deadly earthquake, “when phone service is down, we must run toward the switchrooms as fast as we can.”

Most of us would reconsider a job position that foisted a T-shirt shortages upon you, but add to that a potentially dangerous encounter with a hippopotamus, ebola, and hobbling on frostbitten feet over desolate tundras and it would be fair to say you might begin to consider applying for another job.

But this is messianic stuff, and it’s Huawei prominence as China’s national telecoms champion that were here for – that’s the book we want to read.

Says Ren himself:

A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army.

Those are words that will pull at the heartstrings of any zealous politburo member and leading politburo members, sure enough, weighed in and funds for Huawei were made available with the aim of breaking the Western telecom monopolies. Cheap credit played no small role in that, with the China Development Bank allocating $10 billion for Huawei’s overseas expansion in 2005.

Money was not an issue. And nor was a lack of superhuman drive.

Ren, in Dou’s reading, is more than a company man; he’s an ex PLA nationalist who survived a hard-scrabble youth foraging for food during the Great Famine, his college principal father beaten by his students during the Cultural Revolution. He was a bold survivor who jumped from an iron-rice bowl job in the PLA into private enterprise in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms.

It’s difficult to imagine a more emblematic hunger-to-entrepreneurial-giant modern China story.

To recap, in 1987 Ren founded Huawei in Shenzhen, a special economic zone (SEZ) opposite Hong Kong, with the goal of developing digital phone switches, he and his staff sleeping in snatches between brainstorming on mats.

Huawei, like it or not, is nothing short of a triumph. The only disappointment is that too often the book is flatter than this reader would have liked. Dou, the author, cannot be blamed. Is there a company more secretive than Huawei? And that secrecy costs us the kind of color that would have made the House of Huawei the juicy read it deserves to be.

Is Huawei an agent of the Chinese government. Of course it is. Should that surprise us? No. Should it be laying out the 5G, 6G and beyond backbone of global communications?

No, but does any nation state want their communications owned and operated by non-home players?

In other words, a “No” to Huawei, except for those nations – and that’s most of them these days – who can’t afford the alternative.

BY VIRTUE of its subject matter, any book about the thought of Xi Jinping is bound to have its slow moments – and this one doesn’t disappoint. It’s possible to excerpt a passage at random (see below) and feel sympathy – at a remove, because this is not even “original gangster” Xi – for any Chinese for whom such bedtime reading is a way of getting ahead:

The doctrine of “comprehensively governing the Party strictly” has two crucial reinforcing elements. It is about instilling in party members the ethos of Xi Thought and strengthening the institutional capacity to require party members everywhere to act in accordance with the top party leadership. Together they seek to make the Party and its top or “core” leader work in sync so that the vision and policies of the leader are implemented effectively and efficiently.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (December, 2023)

• ISBN‏: ‎ 0197689361

Despite no shortage of such grit-the-teeth passages, what The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung has going for it is that it’s not Kevin Rudd’s 600-plus page tome, On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World, which has been described as “encyclopedic” on Xi’s thinking and revealing on the subject of the evolution of Rudd’s own thinking.

Rudd, in short, sees Xi as a “Marxist nationalist” and not necessarily averse to war sometime in the future. What’s more, Rudd’s thinking has evolved such that he no longer thinks the West should gift China with “strategic trust.” On the contrary, China’s best presented with “strategic confusion” lest the superpower think twice about sparking WWIII by making good on irredentist territorial claims.

In The Political Thought of Xi Jinping we’re on much less personal ground. There’s no personal journey and Xi is far less a Marxist than a man with an autocratic mission to make a mark on the annals of Chinese and world history. Academic at times, the book nevertheless provides interested readers with what it purports to: a glimpse into just what Xi, with all those books on governance, is thinking – or otherwise.

It’s tempting, after all, to take a skeptical view of a leader’s thoughts when he thinks nothing of spending more than 3-1/2 hours, as he did at the opening of the 19th Party Congress in 2017, sermonizing the long version of “The Chinese dream is a dream about history, the present and the future.”

There’s a strong argument to be made – and The Political Thought of Xi Jinping makes it – that Xi Thought, or more officially, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” is less Marxist ideology than a straight line through Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism to Xi-ism,. The latter is where revolutionary idealism gives way to Party discipline, centralized control and manipulating a Leninist framework to exert and maintain power via the leadership of Xi.

In 2017, we knew Xi saw himself as an agent of change and was ambitious, but we did not fully appreciate how ambitious he truly was. What was clear then was that Xi Thought must be taken seriously, as Xi made it unmistakable that he intended to make himself the helmsman of China’s ship of state, along the line of the Maoist tradition of Mao being “the great helmsman.”

Tsang and Cheung argue that Xi appears to see himself as destined to rescue the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from factionalism and corruption. His mission is to restore the Party’s all-powerful control over the state, which he sees as having been separated as a result of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic political reforms.

He’s also found a way – which Mao, who found China’s “feudal” past repugnant, could not – to embrace China’s “splendid” history – all “5,000 years” of it. In Tsang and Cheung’s reading it’s impossible not to be struck by what must in Xi’s view be his staggering contribution – the ever-ringing refrain of “Chinese characteristics” – in redeeming China’s past: no more humiliation, no more shame, a rejuvenated China manifested as the Chinese dream.

This is a book about Xi Thought, so does Xi actually believe that he himself is key to bringing about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese state and bringing the Chinese dream into being? The authors say he does:

Xi has attracted a legion of critics, including a handful of regime defectors, decrying him for crowning or clowning himself China’s new emperor. Yet, besides his self-interest and concerns for regime security, all signs suggest that Xi genuinely believes that his strong personalist rule and a reinvigorated Leninist party provide the winning formula to achieve the China Dream.

Elsewhere they write:

… with the formalization of Xi Thought, Xi and the Party have converged into one entity, so much so that Xi’s self-interest and the Party’s interest are no longer distinguishable. Since Xi epitomizes the regime, he is the only party member whose “personal intentions” automatically equal the Party’s “organizational intentions.”

The genius, then, if that is what it is, of Xi Jinping Thought is precisely this: it appears to be a sophisticated political doctrine, but it's actually a highly personalized vehicle for Xi's autocratic ambitions. The doctrine doesn't serve the nation or even the Party – it serves Xi. The reason is likely as simple as the fact that Xi’s ambitions are historical – messianic even – in nature.

In parallel to Mao Thought’s being hailed as the only correct path to save China, Xi Thought is presented as the only true path for national rejuvenation. Mao Thought and Xi Thought are also the only ideological contributions of Chinese leaders incorporated into the party and state constitutions as “thoughts” while their titular progenitors hold office. While Xi has not yet so proclaimed, there is little doubt that he aspires for his Thought to be on par with Mao Thought.

The problem with Xi Thought – as was the case with Mao thought – is its recursiveness. Every proclamation, every theoretical construct ultimately resolves back to Xi as the central, indispensable figure. The “thought” is designed so that loyalty to the Party becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to Xi personally.

As the writers put it “belief in socialism means belief in Xi Thought. To “love socialism” is to require the people to embrace Xi Thought.” And thus to love socialism is to love Xi.

It’s almost as if Orwell saw Xi coming in those grim years following the close of WWII.

“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Xi Thought is less a political philosophy and more a cult of personality meticulously constructed to centralize power around Xi himself. When Xi is gone, and no longer able to keep his enemies at bay, the Party will have to reconstruct itself without him.

Some housekeeping: Payments, you may notice, are now accepted, but ChinaDiction will continue to be free for readers. If you choose to pay, it will be accepted with gratitude, but SubStack is far too crowded with writers jostling for a sip of your morning caffeine hit for all of us to be in on the action.

This post is a book review only; book reviews will get precedence in the year ahead, but ChinaDiction still has room for commentary when my schedule permits or the mood takes me.

Thanks for your support.

Chris

Image: Midjourney

IT HAS NOT escaped notice that in the weeks before president-elect Donald Trump's January 20 inauguration, China has upped the ante in its high-stakes pushback against US ring-fencing of its geopolitical and technological ambitions.

In short, China has hacked the US Treasury Department, carried out massive naval drills, deployed ships to the South China Sea, launched the world’s biggest amphibious warship, sabotaged undersea cables and imposed export controls and sanctions on US firms.

And that was before the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that China’s military and intelligence hackers have achieved deep penetration of US infrastructure and telecommunications networks, positioning Beijing to potentially paralyze American response capabilities in any future conflict.

China, we now know, has been enjoying access to Trump’s calls, for example, while methodically positioning itself to impede American response to any future Pacific conflict.

The two massive hacking operations have upended the West’s understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors – once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars.

China’s hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons.

As for those cable attacks, one tweet that has yet to be verified claims that “China's systematic undersea cable sabotage [has been] patented as ‘Towed Undersea Cable Cutting Technology" by Lishui University.’

Taiwan is seeking the help of South Korea in investigating a Chinese-owned ship that Taiwan telecoms operator Chunghwa Telecom and the Taiwan Coast Guard say they believe to have caused damage to a communications cable on January 3.

As for whether China will actually invade Taiwan in 2027, the latest revelations suggest that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may well be ready, as Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has reportedly commanded it to be. Meanwhile, Chinese planners seem to be hopeful that the US will be hamstrung from intervening. Bloomberg:

US officials have recounted in testimony and briefings how Chinese hackers are building the capacity to poison water supplies nationwide, flood homes with sewage, and cut off phones, power, ports and airports, actions that could cause mass casualties, disrupt military operations and potentially plunge the US into “societal panic.” The aim, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly told Congress in January 2024, would be to take down “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Perhaps it’s time to shrug off that ever-present counter argument that China, with its “5,000 years of civilization,” is “special” – unique and deserving of different treatment. As if China’s very existence challenges the possibility of universal applicability of Western international relations theory – because … well, standard models of state behavior don’t fully capture China's motivations and actions.

To the likes of Martin Jacques, whose civilization-state argument revolves around the idea that China fundamentally operates on a different historical and cultural paradigm than Western nation-states, welcome to the China that will shut down your plumbing to feed its revanchist territorial claims.

After all, presumably the aim of the hack of the century – so far – is that before a single bomb falls on Taiwan, China can potentially turn off utilities, disrupt communications, and create domestic havoc that would severely hamper any military response.

As Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, tells the Wall Street Journal “prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers …

are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home.

That chaos is a primary goal, not a side effect. And the methodical penetration of infrastructure since 2019 suggests this isn't just contingency planning – it's a core part of the strategy.

When the war comes to our kitchens – and it seems it is as likely to start there as on foreign soil – nobody is going to be thinking about giving China, the special case, the civilizational wonder, a break – but by then it will be too late.

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Book Review

Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk*

Alison Young

Center Street (April 25, 2023)

352 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1546002936

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1546002932

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

IN LATE 2021, a lab worker in Taipei was bitten by a mouse in a Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 lab.

In fact, she was bitten twice before quitting her job for unknown reasons, although it would be clearly understandable if she came to dislike working with mice.

On November 26, the researcher developed a cough that worsened over the week that followed. On December 9, she tested positive for Covid-19 after a PCR test. The authorities set about tracing 85 people the lab researcher was known to have interacted and shared spaces with.

It is unknown whether she was infected by the mouse bites, or whether some other breach of protocol had occurred at the Taipei lab.

Remarkably, no one was infected by the virus that had hitched a ride with her.

And unfortunately, it was not even a once-in-a-lifetime event.

If you’ve lived in China, gone to the trouble of learning its language and – let’s just imagine for a moment – even profess to be a “China watcher” you will have noticed how theologically tainted the words “lab leak” have become. It’s such that if you meet another China watcher and say you think there might have been an accident in Wuhan they either wrathfully dismiss you, block you (if its social media) or look at you strange, as if you’d admitted to giving some serious thought to whether the world is flat – and not in the Thomas Friedman way.

But why? I’ve never thought it strange – or, let’s get to the quick of this, a racist Trump smear on China – to consider whether an accident may have occurred in China’s leading coronavirus research lab, which happens to be in Wuhan. I’m even certain that China would have gone to every possible length to conceal it if there had been a leak – and even if there was US funding involved, but the latter is another story.

Back to Young’s very readable history of lab leaks – mostly not in China.

For a start, there were leaks of SARS-1 from labs in China, Singapore and Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 led the WHO to warn that a return of SARS would most likely emanate from a lab.

And in 2022 – yes, the year after a researcher was bitten twice by mice – another coronavirus researcher in Taiwan exposed 110 people, while in 2003 her supervisor had been infected with SARS in a lab.

Such near misses are documented in compelling but horrifying succession in health journalist Alison Young’s Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, which basically posits: The only rare thing about leaks of potentially lethal pathogens from labs is the public hearing about them.

In 1977, for example, a decades-old strain of H1N1 influenza virus appeared in what was then the Soviet Union, where a 22-year-old man in Moscow fell ill on November 1, 1977.

By January 1978, this H1N1 flu virus was spreading around the world, with cases starting to be identified in the Philippines and United Kingdom

The flu virus was nearly identical to the H1N1 flu virus of 1950 – as if “preserved – truly frozen in nature or elsewhere,” wrote researchers in 1978.

Other experts were blunter, saying:

‘This virus from 1950 almost certainly escaped back into nature from frozen storage’ —or, more specifically, that it ‘probably escaped from a laboratory.’

Young is an investigative journalist who has covered biosafety issues for close on two decades, and her measured, meticulously researched book documents incident after horrifying incident in which public relations trump public safety when it comes to laboratory-acquired infections.

She talks to Karen Byers, “a biosafety manager at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston,” who has been maintaining running tally of reported incidents of lab-associated infections in the U.S. and abroad.

From 1979 through 2015, about 3,230 lab-associated infections with forty-one deaths had been publicly described in various scientific journal articles and other publications, her research has found. Of these known infections, most occurred in either clinical or research labs.

But the cases in Byers’s tallies are just a fraction of the infections that are actually occurring among lab workers. Underreporting is a widely acknowledged problem, with lab personnel fearing stigma and reprisal when incidents occur.

When it comes to studying lab accidents and assessing the evidence for various safety practices and equipment, “There isn’t any funding for it,” said biosafety consultant Rocco Casagrande.”Basically, almost all of the data on performance of these equipment, accident source terms, accident frequency … especially the things that are truly empirical where someone has set up the test to actually determine what the evidence is from 1980 and before.”

That’s the U.S.

When Young’s book turns to China, it’s not that we find a drastic uptick in accidents; we simply find the same kinds of accidents that Young’s sleuthing has liberated from bureaucratic shelves in the US.

In 2014, she writes, the National Institute of Virology in Beijing accidentally released the SARS virus, leaving …

… The WHO and Chinese health authorities scrambling to contain a growing outbreak of cases linked to the lab’s researchers, their family members, and the health care workers who had treated them.

By summer the outbreak that began at the National Institute of Virology had been contained—but only after three generations of transmission, with nine confirmed cases of SARS and one death. It was lucky that the toll wasn’t much higher.”

The problem:

To the best of our knowledge, there is no internationally maintained database or inventory for high consequence biological agents,’ Kazunobu Kojima, a World Health Organization biosafety expert, told me.

WHO has no access to such information on who’s doing what in terms of gain of function (GOF) or similar research work that comes with an elevated risk.’

Kojima said that countries’ annual emergency preparedness reports show biosafety approaches around the world are uneven, with resource-limited countries struggling to manage biosafety and biosecurity challenges.

Only a tiny fraction of countries around the world have any kind of oversight structure in place to limit who can possess especially dangerous pathogens, to screen buyers of synthetic DNA products, or to regulate so-called dual use research that carries risks of producing knowledge that can be used to cause significant harm, according to the 2021 Global Health Security Index, which examined biosafety and biosecurity capacities in 195 countries.

To return to the 1977 influenza pandemic that many experts suspect leaked and infected the world:

In recent years some researchers have downplayed the relevance of the 1977 influenza epidemic as a real-world example of a global epidemic caused by biological research. They don’t dispute that the origin of the virus almost certainly was not natural. But they say the event didn’t occur in the context of modern biosafety practices. And they essentially argue that if the type of research that led to the escape involved a ‘vaccine trial or vaccine development gone awry’ it is somehow not as relevant to debates over biosafety risks as other kinds of microbiological research.

One doesn’t need to be a virologist to know that this is an argument that simply doesn’t inspire confidence in face of the stakes – not to mention what we have been through over the past three or four years in the grip of a virus of indeterminate origin.

Young’s book, in short, is not only a wake-up call, but also a call to action. She argues that we need to have more oversight and regulation of labs that work with potentially pandemic pathogens. She pushes the rational argument we need more public awareness and engagement on biosafety issues. She maintains we need more ethical and responsible research, balancing the benefits and risks of studying deadly viruses.

There were two ways the SARS virus had the potential to cause a future outbreak, the WHO experts wrote [of the leaks in 2003 and 2004]. It could emerge from an animal reservoir, or it could be released by a lab doing research with live cultures or handling stored clinical specimens.

The report concluded:

The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.

On reading Young’s book, the reader is inclined to wonder, Why the stigmatization of a possible lab leak in Wuhan and how is it we have dodged the bullet of complacency for so long?

* Regular readers will notice that this is a reworking of a post from 1-1/2 years ago. I’m not reposting it to fill in the gaps, but to do the book justice and to point out that here in the early days 2025 we’re still no closer to consensus on what happened in the latter months of 2019 when a novel pathogen primed for human infection started its march to global domination. Many China watchers – who deep down know that accidents can happen anywhere and the only thing that is certain in the case of China is that it will be covered up –regard “lab-leakers” as tin-foil-hat conspiracy junkies. It’s a benighted view that should be abandoned as the evidence increasingly suggests that a lab leak is not only plausible but possible.

Ko Wen-je. Photo: 中央資訊網

OVER THE FINAL Friday and weekend of 2024, former presidential hopeful and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (Kē Wénzhé 柯文哲) was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and embezzling public funds; he was released on bail after being held incommunicado for four months on Saturday.

So Taiwan’s boisterous politics take a breath before inevitably returning to the ring in 2025.

“From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being there for me after four long months of waiting,” said a visibly emotional Ko, who stumbled after being led out of pre-charge detention by supporters.

Ko’s supporters – known locally as “little grass” (xiǎo cǎo, 小草) – are key players in a saga that has shaken modern traditional Taiwan politics. The reason is there in the nickname, which suggests tiny blades of grass (humble individually; powerful collectively) – a force outside the the two-party political establishment that has ruled over Taiwan since the year 2000.

In 2000 former president Chen Shui-bian (Chén Shuǐbiǎn, 陳水扁) led the pro-Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to power, leading to a two-term oscillation, green to blue, and blue to green – the colors respectively of the DPP and the KMT.

That is, until Lai Ching-te (Lài Qīngdé 賴清德) led the DPP to power for a third term in January (2024) handily defeating the KMT’s Hou Yu-ih (Hóu Yǒuyí 侯友宜) by some six points.

Did Ko’s 26 percent of January 2024’s presidential election significantly slew the outcome in favor of one of the two entrenched two big political parties in Taiwan? The truth is that his time-for-change campaigning undoubtedly cost the DPP many young votes. It probably also cost many would-be KMT voters, who saw Ko as a “safe,” less “radical” alternative to the KMT.

Ko, like the KMT, after all, is opportunistically free from ideology and more likely to strive for a deal with the looming Godzilla of the East over the Taiwan Strait.

But to get this into some kind of perspective big picture, consider Bernie Sanders running as a third-party candidate in the US and getting a quarter of the vote in a presidential election. That's somewhat what Ko Wen-je and his Taiwan People's Party delivered in Taiwan's 2024 presidential election. Like Sanders, Ko positioned himself as an outsider challenging the established political order, appealing especially to younger voters frustrated with traditional politics.

Yes, Taiwan's political system differs from that of the US. It's a single-round election, unlike the US electoral college system. Ko's stated policies and ideology don’t map onto Sanders’, but they appealed to younger voters disaffected with conventional power structures. The comparison helps in terms of grasping how significant it was for a third-party candidate to capture over a quarter of the Taiwan presidential vote in what had historically been a two-party dominated system.

"It's now no longer a two horse race, it's a three horse race," political scientist and non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub Wen-ti Sung commented at the time.

After positioning the campaign as a “third way” between the KMT and the DPP, Ko and the TPP had arrived as a third force in Taiwan politics.

That makes the fact that Ko’s facing 28-1/2 years in jail – at least if the prosecution gets its way, which most commentators in Taiwan think it won’t – such a fall. He’s gone from running Taiwan’s equivalent of a “drain-the-swamp,” “out with the old, in with the new” campaign to personifying the politics he previously challenged.

It’s always a bad move to “chill the hearts,” as it’s put in Chinese, of your most ardent supporters, and in this case support for Ko when he was placed in pre-charge confinement was tepid.

As Rex How, a publisher and one-time adviser to former KMT president Ma Ying-jeou, told The Diplomat, if the electoral spending scandal had not happened “there would have been many more of … [Ko’s] supporters protesting outside the court [following Ko’s detainment].”

“It could’ve been 20,000 people; instead, it was about 200.”

KO’S POLITICAL CAREER was preceded by a fall from grace. As an attending physician and director of the surgical ICU at National Taiwan University Hospital, his professional life nosedived in 2011 when HIV-infected organs were transplanted into five patients under his watch.

In August 2012, the Control Yuan, Taiwan’s top watchdog body, impeached Ko for medical malpractice and referred him to the Public Functionaries Disciplinary Sanction Commission for disciplinary punishment. In 2013, he was demoted by two ranks despite Ko’s claims of innocence.

The impeachment flagged “neglecting his duties as head of the hospital’s organ transplant task force by entrusting non-qualified staff with writing prescriptions and interpreting exam results,” according to one local news report.

The HIV-positive exam result was written in English, it was reported at the time, leading to confusion amid the “non-qualified” staff.

It might be interpreted as a kind of sloppiness that would come back to haunt him later.

Ko’s latest indictment, as Angelica Oung puts it in her Substack, Taipology, is a “sprawling 190-page PDF indictment document … [that] contains juicy details such as how Ko likes to refer to himself as ‘his majesty’ [zhèn 朕 – the imperial first-person pronoun used exclusively by Chinese emperors from the Qin Dynasty onwards] in front of his staff and lurid descriptions of interactions with the moneyed class that belies Ko’s image as a swamp-drainer.”

Putting aside the tome-like prosecutorial case (critics say some of the accusations lack substance but agree the prosecution will nail him on one or two counts), it appears that, as Oung sums up, “Ko’s camp is simply extraordinarily sloppy and naive when it comes to money and the law.”

That’s probably understating the case. What is likely to be particularly galling to his followers is his haughty hubris. Admittedly, some – like the 200 protestors at the time of his confinement – were not going down without a fight. One was even arrested in September for threatening to kill the judges and prosecutors behind Ko’s incarceration.

But most supporters were left with a man who did not declare the finances for his election campaign and was caught shredding notes with instructions to his generals to flee the country – not to mention internal audits of the finances of his electoral PR firm. One founding member of Ko’s TPP told Chinese-language media, “The party is a one-voice system with no party discipline, lacking formal correspondence.”

Ko, gaffe-prone, frequently described by local commentators as '“narcissistic,” “superficial” and “patronizing,” known known as “Ko P” or “Professor Ko” to his supporters, Instagram- and YouTube-friendly, loftily above the fray, was being sucked into the muddy eddies of Taiwan politics.

Taiwan’s political third force – what is left of the TPP – was either spent or will have to reinvent itself without the “one voice” that led to its creation.

But something was never “right” about Ko – making it somewhat remarkable that things ever came to this. After all, the Taiwan Urological Association was not alone in calling out his wit when he likened cross-strait relations to prostate cancer – a metaphor about the need to co-exist with one’s enemies.

In attempting to position himself as at best a partially aligned solo player in Taiwan’s politics – neither 100 percent KMT nor, ultimately, with the more ideologically driven DPP – Ko was always at risk of taking a hit, making it imperative that the TPP be a particularly tight ship.

It was not. It appears most likely that Ko bought his own BS, possibly even to the extent that not only members of his own party were beneath him but the entire political system was too.

A commentator in the local English-language media ahead of the elections that brought the DPP’s Lai Ching-te to power said, “Many of Ko’s supporters expect a ‘rule-breaker’.”

As Kurt Vonnegut said of his vocation, fiction: "Learn the rules before breaking them.” In the non-fictional world, Ko appears to have never grasped that – and his own narrative eclipsed him.

Some Housekeeping …

… As substackers call it (thanks to Bill Bishop, I believe): ChinaDiction has been sunning in Beidaihe for far too long due to what I’m calling the “three unexpecteds” – an unexpected sojourn in Taiwan (which actually involved working); an unexpected bout of ill health; and an unexpected departure from Taiwan.

That was enough to turn everything upside down until very recently.

ChinaDiction is back, and looking ahead, posts will be likely less frequent and less “greater sinosphere” all-encompassing than before. Expect more zooms into interesting cross-strait issues peppered with book reviews. Today’s book review is Ian Johnson’s Sparks.

Book Review

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

Ian Johnson

Penguin

373 pages

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Ian Johnson’s latest book – the writer should need no introduction to China watchers – could have been called something awful like “Remembering” because it’s about forgotten things, things salvaged from the cracks of collective memory by candle-bearers keeping the past alive.

But instead it’s inspired by a tiny magazine, “Spark,” which had a brief and far from widely read run in 1960. Unknown in China, the university-student samizdat germinated amid rural poverty and the famine failures of the Great Leap Forward. Those behind it were sentenced to decades in prison. During the Cultural Revolution, a few years later, two were executed.

A video documentary by semi-underground filmmaker Hu Jie (hú jié 胡杰) is available on YouTube – highly recommended and with welcome English subtitles, because those hinterland accents are nonstop curve balls even for those who fancy themselves as solid Chinese speakers .

Johnson’s quest is counter-historians like those involved with “Spark” …

Independent writers, artists, and filmmakers [who] still produce works about government-induced famines, political campaigns, massacres, and virus outbreaks. Their goal: to challenge, destabilize, and contest the state’s version of reality. With success by no means certain, they carry on, believing that history vindicates the truth.

That takes us first to Dao County in southern Hunan where in 1967 more than 9,000 “class enemies” were massacred by CCP cadres in Dao County, their bodies tossed into a river to decompose. It takes us to Jiabiangou (the “Ditch”), a labor camp in Gansu, where thousands of prisoners were driven by starvation into cannibalism in the late 1950s – two things among far too many that the CCP would prefer that everybody forgot.

After all China’s central government demands total control over the guiding narrative. Forget that and be accused of “historical nihilism.”

Nihilism is Xi Jinping’s grab-all put down for any thinking that pushes back on the CCP fairy tale about being behind the most enlightened – and “correct” – governance in the world.

All the same, a small minority truck in “nothingness” that is banned in Xi’s China.

Underground historians had been exploring the dark corners of the Communist Party’s history since the 1940s, but digital technologies meant that their work could be republished and reach millions of people through social media, blogs, and some traditional media outlets.

Counter history – nuanced details kept alive by underground barefoot historians, so to speak, are a source of hope for Johnson, and not simply in China:

It is also part of a global trend. In fact, if we look at our own countries—in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Europe—we can see that we are all in the midst of a memory boom—an ever-expanding number of books, movies, exhibitions, and works of art that try to make sense of the present through a past. And more often than not, this past is increasingly recounted by eyewitnesses. In Western countries, that trend began in the aftermath of World War I. Mass literacy, cheap publishing, and the new movie industry helped millios of people understand this traumatic war through the concept of shell shock.

One would only be so mean-spirited as to give Sparks four stars if they’d already read Johnson’s Souls of China, and hoped for something equally compelling and coherent. Yes, Sparks occasionally seems somewhat patched together from old notes, but it’s important in a way that few books are about China, and that’s more than enough.

A candle vigil on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Photo: WikiCommons.

By Wu'er Kaixi

As Ukraine defends its sovereignty against Russian aggression, it is also time to remember another struggle for freedom and democratic sovereignty that has been unfolding for decades in China.

It is a struggle that most people hear little about because China has become so capable at suppressing news that reaches the outside world, but occasionally we hear of concentration camps in Xinjiang, of forced Han Chinese educational curricula in Tibet, of imprisoned human rights lawyers, of disappeared petitioners who have been dispossessed of their land and other abuses of power.

The one massive abuse of power by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that everyone has heard of is the one that I participated in as a student leader, forcing me into exile 34 years ago.

Today it is usually referred to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre – the CCP’s brutal crushing of a peaceful pro-democracy movement.

I, and other survivors and exiles of that tragedy, today call again for renewed global pressure on Beijing to respect human rights and the rule of law.

Our numbers have grown over the years as China – rather than becoming more open, more tolerant and more accommodating of the diversity of its population – has become an even less tolerant regime than the one I petitioned in my youth.

Today we are joined by Hong Kong democracy activists, Tibetan and Uyghur freedom fighters, and other dissidents who have suffered under the CCP’s tyranny. We appeal to the world to stand with us, as you did in 1989, and to echo our demands directly to the Chinese regime.

We call on China to:

•  Dismantle the “Great Firewall” that censors the internet and blocks access to information.

•  Release China’s hundreds of thousands of prisoners of conscience.

•  Rescind Hong Kong’s National Security Law.

•  Stop the genocide of the Uyghur people and end all other suppression of so-called ethnic groups such as the Tibetans.

It is time, for example, that the Chinese regime respected the rights and autonomy of the people of Hong Kong, who have been living under a draconian national security law that violates the promises made by Beijing in the Sino-British Declaration and the Basic Law. And it must end its brutal campaign of repression and genocide against the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang, where more than a million people are detained in concentration camps.

The four demands listed above should not be negotiable. They are the minimum requirements for China to be considered a responsible member of the international community – a community that collectively upholds the universal values of human dignity and freedom. The demands also speak to the aspirations of millions of Chinese people who have been silenced and oppressed by the CCP for decades.

If China meets these demands, we will be ready to engage in further dialogue and cooperation on issues such as media freedom, judicial independence, civil liberties and democratic reform. These are not only our rights as Chinese citizens, but also our duties as global citizens. We dream of a world in which China is a partner, not an adversary – a nation that can work with other nations to build a more peaceful and prosperous world.

This is not something we should wait to happen; 34 years ago, we witnessed the massacre of our fellow students and citizens who were peacefully protesting for a more inclusive future, for a future in which the people were allowed to have their say.

But the reality is that the regime has grown more powerful, more aggressive, threatening its neighbors and undermining the rules-based international order – and that has happened because the world has failed to hold China accountable for its atrocities and abuses.

We urge the leaders and people of the free world to stand with us and amplify our voices. We urge the leaders and people of the free world to make our demands the basis for any engagement with China. We urge the leaders and people of the free world to make our demands a condition for all further economic and trade relations with China.

We urge them to act now, before it is too late.

Wu'er Kaixi is a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and a democracy activist.

Editing for clarity by Chris Taylor

Note to subscribers

Apologies for the lengthy delay in posts but I have recently moved from Bangkok to Taipei, where I’m taking up the role of China correspondent with RFA. ChinaDiction will be more sporadic in future and focused on guest editorials and book reviews with China/Taiwan focus.

Chris

Terry Gou and Hou You-yi buddy up in a Taiwan Plus screen grab.

It appeared to be head and neck in the final run for the KMT’s presidential nominee pick, with near universal (in Taiwan at least) expectations that Taipei New City mayor You Hou-yi (侯友宜, Hóu Yǒuyí) would represent the party even as Foxconn founder Terry Gou (郭台銘, Guō Táimíng) piled on the pressure.

The KMT chose Hou as expected but it still faces a deep internal contradiction between its need to maintain its Mainlander identity and its need to engage with the Taiwanese majority electorate.

Hou, the New Taipei mayor, was seen as the most legitimate contender by many in the party, but he has been vague on his policies toward China and national defense.

Reports Reuters:

Formerly the head of the National Police Agency, 65-year-old Hou gained popularity after winning a re-election in New Taipei city late last year in a local election in which the KMT trounced the DPP.

The KMT denies being pro-Beijing, although it supports maintaining good relations with China as well as the proposal that both are part of a single China though each can have its own interpretation of the term.

Gou, the Foxconn founder, is deep blue – an old school KMT advocate from a so-called 49er family – who calls for dialogue with China based on the One China Principle and the 1992 Consensus, and opposes Taiwan becoming an “ammunition dump” for the US.

Hou’s candidacy will make the 2024 election more competitive and unpredictable, as he could appeal to moderate voters who are dissatisfied with the DPP’s handling of cross-strait relations and domestic issues. However, Hou would also have to consider the risk of running for president only one year after winning re-election as mayor, which means he’ll need a by-election to find his own replacement in New Taipei City.

Donovan Smith again has argued that the KMT’s possible presidential nominations, Eric Chu, Hou Yu-ih, and Terry Gou, differ on cross-strait relations and military issues – Hou more moderate and vague, while Gou more deep blue and explicit.

Another veteran Taiwan commentator Michael Turton took a more acerbic view, pointing out that the KMT lacks interesting, forward-looking or progressive public policies, and predicts that it will resort to an ugly, negative, stereotyped campaign in the 2024 presidential election. He contended that the main contenders for the KMT nomination, Hou You-yi and Terry Gou, appeal to different segments of voters based on their backgrounds and views on COVID-19, China and national defense.

Hou – now the anointed nominee – is more moderate and mainstream than Gou, who is a deep blue with populist tendencies. However, Hou's popularity has declined as he has become more public and aligned with the KMT party doctrine. Hou's candidacy could still alienate the deep blue base of the KMT, which might have prefered Gou’s nationalist and authoritarian rhetoric.

How can Hou, asked Turton, differentiate himself from the DPP on public policy issues, as his policies as mayor of New Taipei City are hardly different from those of the DPP?

That remains to be seen.

Turton is not alone in speculating that Gou might run as an independent. That also remains to be seen, but is probably unlikely.

Local Chinese-language media has been critical of KMT Party Chair Eric Chu, who in fairness is in an invidious position, with KMT Taipei City Councilor Chin Heui-chu (秦慧珠) arguing that today …

… the most mysterious recruitment drama in history will be resolved but however it works out it will be difficult to ask everyone to unite.

Chin pointed out that the decision on the presidential nominee had been undertaken amid such confusion and in such secrecy …

How will it unite the ‘non-green alliance’? Who outside the party would dare to trust the KMT?”

It’s a good point: the KMT is on the back foot due to deciding to forego a primary for its presidential candidate, nominating candidates by a special committee composed of party leaders, representatives, and experts, arguing this would avoid internal strife and help find a candidate with broad appeal outside the pan-green camp.

It could equally end up being a compromise choice with little allure to an electorate weighing not just China issues but everything from a tepid economy, low wages, climate change – and concomitant rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and water shortages – air pollution and social welfare in the form of an aging population, low birth rates, income inequality, housing affordability, healthcare reform, and pension sustainability.

And then there are the usual election-grabbing headlines: what’s wrong with lower taxes, less red tape, and revived cross-strait trade and tourism?

Gou muddied the waters for some time with his strong appeal among pan-white voters – supporters of Ko Wen-je (柯文哲, Kē Wénzhé) Taiwan People’s Party, who are dissatisfied with both the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition.

If Gou goes it alone, the 2024 presidential elections will be even more deeply divided, which is likely to bode well for Lai Ching-de of the Democratic Progressive Party.

At least it’s extremely unlikely that veteran James Soong, who divided the 2000 presidential elections and gave the DPP their first victory under Chen Shui-bian, will run in the presidential elections next year.

He has run for president four times before, in 2000, 2012, 2016, and 2020, but never won. He’s 81 years old and was hospitalized twice last year for pneumonia and a stroke. He has also been facing legal troubles over his alleged involvement in a corruption scandal during his tenure as governor of Taiwan Province from 1993 to 1998, and his former allies – former president Ma Ying-jeou and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je – have distanced themselves from him. His pro-China stance has also alienated many Taiwanese voters who are wary of Beijing's pressure and interference.

Ko Wen-je's chances of winning the presidential election next year are also slim, as the TPP is a small centrist party that he founded in 2019 and he only got 11.2% of the votes in the last presidential election, coming in third behind the Democratic Progressive Party's Tsai Ing-wen and the Kuomintang's Han Kuo-yu.

Ko is also known for his outspoken and controversial remarks, which have often offended or alienated various groups of voters. He has been accused of being pro-China, anti-Taiwan, anti-Japan, anti-US, anti-women, anti-gay, and anti-environment. He has also been criticized for his lack of political vision, leadership skills, and policy proposals.

He’s not a realistic contender, but he will steal some all-important votes, and meanwhile the KMT may have finally chosen their “man,” but the real fun is only just beginning

As Courtney Donovan Smith noted in his follow up tweet to the one above:

There is a lot of concern in KMT on party unity once Chu's decision is announced, like in 2019. Also worries Gou might run anyway if he's not picked.

Chu’s decision has been announced, now the KMT faces unity issues and a DPP that had its presidential pick sorted well in advance.

Gou and Ko are yet more potential flies in the ointment; it is unlikely to be anything other than a rambunctious fight to the end – but who expects anything less of Taiwanese politics?

ChinaDiction will – and feel free to jump ship to newsletters with a genuine news component if you’re disappointed – from now on be striving to put up one book review with some kind of Greater Sinosphere connection at least once a week.

If you enjoy the reviews, please stick with me and spread the word. If you don’t, thanks for your past support and best, Chris.

Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk

Alison Young

Center Street (April 25, 2023)

352 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1546002936

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1546002932

In late 2021, a lab worker in Taipei was bitten by a mouse in a Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 lab.

In fact, she was bitten twice before quitting her job for unknown reasons, although it’s obviously possible she came to dislike working with mice.

On November 26, the researcher developed a cough that worsened over the week that followed. On December 9, she tested positive for Covid-19 after a PCR test. The authorities set about tracing 85 people the lab researcher was known to have interacted and shared spaces with.

It is unknown whether she was infected by the mouse bites, or whether some other breach of protocol had occurred at the Taipei lab.

Remarkably, no one was infected by the virus that had hitched a ride with her.

And unfortunately, it was not even a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Leaks of SARS-1 from labs in China, Singapore and Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 led the WHO to warn that a return of SARS would most likely emanate from a lab.

And in 2022 – yes, the year after a researcher was bitten twice by mice – another coronavirus researcher in Taiwan exposed 110 people, while in 2003 her supervisor had been infected with SARS in a lab.

Such near misses are documented in compelling but horrifying succession in a new book that sheds light on a ring-fenced world of pathogen leaks from the supposedly secure sites in which we research biological threats to humanity.

Journalist Alison Young’s Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk basically posits: The only rare thing about leaks of potentially lethal pathogens from labs is the public hearing about them.

In 1977, for example, a decades-old strain of H1N1 influenza virus appeared in what was then the Soviet Union, where a 22-year-old man in Moscow fell ill on November 1, 1977.

By January 1978, this H1N1 flu virus was spreading around the world, with cases starting to be identified in the Philippines and United Kingdom

The flu virus was nearly identical to the H1N1 flu virus of 1950 – as if “preserved – truly frozen in nature or elsewhere,” wrote researchers in 1978.

Other experts were blunter, saying:

‘This virus from 1950 almost certainly escaped back into nature from frozen storage’ —or, more specifically, that it ‘probably escaped from a laboratory.’

Young is an investigative journalist who has covered biosafety issues for close on two decades, and her measured, meticulously researched book documents incident after horrifying incident in which public relations trump public safety when it comes to laboratory-acquired infections.

She talks to Karen Byers, “a biosafety manager at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston,” who has been maintaining running tally of reported incidents of lab-associated infections in the U.S. and abroad.

From 1979 through 2015, about 3,230 lab-associated infections with forty-one deaths had been publicly described in various scientific journal articles and other publications, her research has found. Of these known infections, most occurred in either clinical or research labs.

But the cases in Byers’s tallies are just a fraction of the infections that are actually occurring among lab workers. Underreporting is a widely acknowledged problem, with lab personnel fearing stigma and reprisal when incidents occur.

When it comes to studying lab accidents and assessing the evidence for various safety practices and equipment, ‘There isn’t any funding for it,’ said biosafety consultant Rocco Casagrande.’Basically, almost all of the data on performance of these equipment, accident source terms, accident frequency … especially the things that are truly empirical where someone has set up the test to actually determine what the evidence is from 1980 and before.’

That’s the U.S.

When Young’s book turns to China, it’s not that we find a drastic uptick in accidents; we find the same kind of accidents that Young’s sleuthing has liberated from bureaucratic shelves at home.

In 2014, she writes, the National Institute of Virology in Beijing accidentally released the SARS virus, leaving …

… The WHO and Chinese health authorities scrambling to contain a growing outbreak of cases linked to the lab’s researchers, their family members, and the health care workers who had treated them.

By summer the outbreak that began at the National Institute of Virology had been contained—but only after three generations of transmission, with nine confirmed cases of SARS and one death. It was lucky that the toll wasn’t much higher.”

The problem:

‘To the best of our knowledge, there is no internationally maintained database or inventory for high consequence biological agents,’ Kazunobu Kojima, a World Health Organization biosafety expert, told me.

‘WHO has no access to such information on who’s doing what in terms of gain of function (GOF) or similar research work that comes with an elevated risk.’

Kojima said that countries’ annual emergency preparedness reports show biosafety approaches around the world are uneven, with resource-limited countries struggling to manage biosafety and biosecurity challenges.

Only a tiny fraction of countries around the world have any kind of oversight structure in place to limit who can possess especially dangerous pathogens, to screen buyers of synthetic DNA products, or to regulate so-called dual use research that carries risks of producing knowledge that can be used to cause significant harm, according to the 2021 Global Health Security Index, which examined biosafety and biosecurity capacities in 195 countries.

To return to the 1977 influenza pandemic that many experts suspect leaked and infected the world:

In recent years some researchers have downplayed the relevance of the 1977 influenza epidemic as a real-world example of a global epidemic caused by biological research. They don’t dispute that the origin of the virus almost certainly was not natural. But they say the event didn’t occur in the context of modern biosafety practices. And they essentially argue that if the type of research that led to the escape involved a ‘vaccine trial or vaccine development gone awry’ it is somehow not as relevant to debates over biosafety risks as other kinds of microbiological research.  

One doesn’t need to be a virologist to know that this is an argument that simply doesn’t inspire confidence in face of the stakes – not to mention what we have been through over the past three or four years in the grip of a virus of indeterminate origin.

Young’s book, in short, is not only a wake-up call, but also a call to action. She argues that we need to have more oversight and regulation of labs that work with potentially pandemic pathogens. She pushes the rational argument we need more public awareness and engagement on biosafety issues. She maintains we need more ethical and responsible research, balancing the benefits and risks of studying deadly viruses.

There were two ways the SARS virus had the potential to cause a future outbreak, the WHO experts wrote [of the leaks in 2003 and 2004]. It could emerge from an animal reservoir, or it could be released by a lab doing research with live cultures or handling stored clinical specimens.

The report concluded: “The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.”

On reading Young’s book, the reader is inclined to wonder, Why the stigmatization of a possible lab leak in Wuhan and how is it we have dodged the bullet of complacency for so long?

Last year, Substack abandoned an effort to raise as much as $100 million from potential investors, the New York Times reported. It also laid off about 14% of its staff.

It’s now asking us, the content providers to invest:

The San Francisco-based company is letting its authors put in as little as $100 for shares. Co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi said in a blog post Tuesday that recent regulatory changes allow businesses to tap more money from less-wealthy investors, a move they see as advantageous to the company.

“We’re doing this because the dynamics of a platform like Substack change if the people who are building their businesses on it are owners of it, too,” they said.

Wefunder.com, the site Substack is using to collect the investments, has made such “community rounds” easier, they added. On Wefunder, they warned investors that the company is a startup “on an extremely ambitious mission” and writers shouldn’t participate unless they could afford to lose their entire investment.

The USS John S McCain in the South China Sea. Photo: Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class James Vazquez via WikiCommons.

Seizing the South China Sea

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent long piece on how China took command of the South China Sea. Most of the early roll out of artificial, military island bases took place during the Obama administration, which obviously had its eyes elsewhere at the time.

The SCS, through which trillions in trade travels every year is nearly now under the complete Chinese control – and the US military is concerned that it might be harder to dislodge than was previously thought.

The disputed sea is ringed by China, Taiwan and Southeast Asian nations, but Beijing claims nearly all of it. It has turned reefs into artificial islands, then into military bases, with missiles, radar systems and air strips that are a problem for the U.S. Navy. It has built a large coast guard that among other things harasses offshore oil-and-gas operations of Southeast Asian nations, and a fishing militia that swarms the rich fishing waters, lingering for days.

In short, if you don’t track this stuff, it’s a big deal:

China’s broader challenge to America’s long pre-eminence across the Indo-Pacific region threatens U.S. allies such as Japan, and puts the vast majority of the world’s advanced semiconductors, which are produced in Taiwan, at risk. China’s buildup in the South China Sea especially threatens the Philippines, a U.S. ally.

We can’t really say this happened behind our backs, because there was no shortage of reporting and discussion of China’s rollout into the SCS, but the “brazen” scale of China’s ambitions have definitely taken some by surprise.

In the years after Mr. Xi rose to power, U.S. officials didn’t realize the degree to which he would break from the past in taking a more confrontational foreign-policy approach, said former U.S. political and military officials. 

They ‘found it very hard to believe that China would do something so coercive and so brazen, and by the time they understood the ambition—just how big these things are going to get, just how militarized—it was too late to do anything about it,’ said Gregory Poling, author of a 2022 book on the history of America’s involvement in the South China Sea and director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Altogether now: where did that virus come from?

CNBC reports that The House of Representatives on Friday unanimously voted to declassify information on possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Covid-19 pandemic, sending the bill to President Joe Biden.

The Senate also voted unanimously earlier this month to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify such information.

The move comes as the mainstream media comes around to the plausibility of a possible lab leak in Wuhan as the source of a pandemic that has led to as many as 18 million deaths worldwide.

As the Financial Times puts it, the recognition of plausibility for a theory long marginalized in Crankville can probably be put down to:

… the potential conflict of interest among the scientists who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis at the outset in prestigious scientific journals such as The Lancet and Nature Medicine.

This provided the false impression that a natural spillover was the scientific consensus. This conflict arises from the fact that researchers perform, and want to continue to perform, precisely the sorts of experiment that make a laboratory leak much more likely. These include gain of function experiments where they investigate whether they can enable, by genetic modification, an animal virus to infect human cells (or ‘humanised”’mice). These experiments are performed worldwide on a variety of organisms and were being performed in Wuhan on Sars-Cov-2 like viruses.

Iran Saudi deal, China brokered

With Xi announcing his first meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since Russia went to war with the state, China’s stepping up its peace-making game, fresh from overseeing talks in Beijing that have brought Saudi Arabia and Iran back together, reports The Guardian.

The two great oil-producing rivals of the Middle East, have agreed to restore ties and reopen embassies seven years after relations were severed.

… ‘As a result of the talks, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to resume diplomatic relations and reopen embassies … within two months,’ Iran’s state news agency Irna reported, citing a joint statement.

The agreement has potentially wide implications for the Iran nuclear deal and the civil war in Yemen, where the two sides are locked in a proxy war, and shows the new determination of Saudi Arabia to conduct a foreign policy independent of the west.

And they did it all without resorting to the use of English!

Central bank chief keeps job

Yi Gang, pictured in 2013. Photo: World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland via WikiCommons.

All the talk of massive restructurings in Beijing aside, the central bank chief, Yi Gang, has kept his job, according to the Financial Times.

Xi Jinping has kept the country’s central bank governor Yi Gang in his post and retained his finance and commerce ministers, as the Chinese president defied expectations of a large-scale overhaul of his cabinet at this year’s annual parliamentary meeting.

The reappointments, which analysts said would reassure markets nervous about plans by Beijing to reform the financial sector, were among a swath of senior posts announced at the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress on Sunday.

The SVB factor

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Photo: Tony Webster; WikiCommons.

TechCrunch reports that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is creating “panic” in China, but others are more sanguine, with China commentators pointing out that while there are lessons for (heavily indebted) China, there’s no immediate risk.

According to China’s Security Times:

While the SVB incident reflects loosened regulation of such banks in the U.S., a slew of financial regulatory reforms in China over the past years have cleaned up the industry, curbed shadow banking and reduced financial risks.

In addition, China has been closing regulatory loopholes, the editorial said. In the latest move, China said last week it would set up a new national financial regulatory body consolidating oversight of the industry. ‘Although the SVB incident won't have material impact on China's finiancial markets, China's financial industry still needs to earnestly learn from this lesson, and always prioritise risk prevention and control,’ the newspaper said.

We’ll see how that all plays out … Logically, sooner or later one would expect collapsing banks in China.

Do we know, for example, whether everyone got their money back in the banking crisis of Henan Province last year, as well reported as it was by the likes of CNN?

An honest doctor

The man known as the SARS whistleblower – the first SARS that is – Jiang Yanyong passed away last Saturday (12 March) at the age of 91, reports the China Digital Times, which notes that most Chinese-language searches for him yield a 404.

In a quick translation from the China Digital Times:

In early 2003, as SARS was raging, ordinary people didn’t know what the disease was.

Jiang Yanyong learned the inside story from personal channels, and was very anxious, especially during the press conference on the afternoon of April 3, 2003, which made him extremely angry. The then Minister of Health announced that ‘as of March 31,’ there were ‘12 cases in Beijing and 3 deaths,’ and repeated several times that the SARS epidemic in some parts of China ‘has been effectively controlled.’

On the evening of April 4, Jiang Yanyong wrote an 800-word email based on the real data he learned from several hospitals and sent it to CCTV-4 and Phoenix Satellite TV.

He wrote in the letter: ‘When I went to the ward today, all the doctors and nurses were very angry after reading yesterday's news.’

As one Chinese commentator put it, “In a sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that Jiang Yanyong is a hero of our time. So far, he is still unknown” in a reference to the near invisibility of the doctor who alerted the world to the first SARS outbreak in his own country.

The Greater Sinosphere

Australia

Drew strikes again

Australia’s most renowned anti-CCP-baiter is at it again – and getting away with it, thankfully.

And the result:

Hong Kong

Tiananmen vigil organizers jailed

Hong Kong has arrested three former organizers of the annual Tiananmen vigil for 4-1/2 months, according to media reports.

Chow Hang-tung, Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong were arrested in 2021 and were jailed on Saturday for “failing to provide authorities with information on the group in accordance with a national security law.”

40,000 quarantine units sit idle

Yes, in the world’s most expensive property market, CNN reports”

Welcome to Hong Kong, where the average home sells for well north of a million dollars – and even a parking space can go for close to a million – but where more than 200,000 people face waits of at least half a decade for subsidized public housing.

The Hong Kong government says it’s hard-pressed to find land to erect subsidized living space for its citizens, but in the meantime some 40,000 units on 80 hectares of land are sitting unused.

Hong Kong authorities have not revealed to the public how much the network of quarantine facilities cost. But its total spending bill on the pandemic in the past three years has run to $76 billion (HK$600 billion), according to the city’s financial secretary.

Taiwan

Securing a line out

As ChinaDiction reported at the time Taiwan's communications vulnerability was highlighted when the two undersea cables connecting the Taiwan-controlled Matsu islands, were cut, leaving the 14,000 people who live there cut off from the internet.

It was reportedly an “accident” caused by Chinese vessels, but nobody knows that for certain, and it’s led to some soul searching along the lines of, What if all Taiwan is cut off from the internet by China?

A backup microwave system that transmits signals from the top of a mountain in Taipei to Matsu was able to restored around 5% of the bandwidth that the cables had provided, reports Reuters.

This month, the government upgraded the system and internet speed significantly improved. But because there are few cable repair ships in the region, residents must wait until late April for internet access to be fully restored.

Meanwhile …

The Ukraine war has lent new urgency to Taiwan's efforts to bolster its security, especially against Chinese cyber attacks or attempts to sever any of 14 cables that connect it to the global internet.

‘Strategic communications, internally and externally, is what keeps us up at night, particularly in the aftermath of Ukraine,’ said Tzeng Yisuo, an analyst at Taiwan's top military think tank, the Institute for National Defence and Security Research.

Taiwan's total satellite bandwidth is about 0.02% of what its undersea cables provide, according to Kenny Huang, chief executive at Taiwan Network Information Center, the island's internet domain manager.

Obviously, Taiwan does not trust Elon Musk to come to the rescue with Starlink terminals, which means it’s going to have to scramble and come up with its own solutions.

In this, as is the case with water, energy and even eggs, Taiwan is looking vulnerable to a blockade – war aside – before the outbreak of hostilities.

All Taiwan’s household data for $5,000

It’s difficult to say which is more absurd: somebody getting hold of the personal data of everybody in Taiwan – more than 23 million people – or the fact they put it up for sale for $5,000.

Commonwealth Magazine has the story in English.

‘This was a major national security incident,’ said Kenny Huang (黃勝雄), the managing director and CEO of the government-funded Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC). He said he had not heard of any country facing as massive a leak of citizen information as Taiwan.

Disinfo on the horizon

If keeping a line open out of Taiwan is a problem (see above) the Taiwan News reports on another related problem; keeping a lid on the lines into and out of China.

Big trouble is expected around the time of the presidential elections early next year.

Taiwan already faces a large volume of propaganda and disinformation. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD) has been actively targeting Taiwan for some time, and Taiwan is widely seen as ground zero and the testing ground for UFWD activities.

Financial Times reported during the 2020 national election cycle that reporters for both the Taiwanese news outlets Want Want China Times newspaper and CTiTV news received instructions directly from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO). These revelations led to abusive libel lawsuits against prominent journalist Kathrin Hille, though in the end they were fortunately dropped. CTiTV was eventually taken off cable TV, giving over half their entire news coverage to the then China-favored KMT presidential candidate Daniel Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), but China Times is still operating normally and CTiTV is now on Youtube.

Basically, we’re looking at the convergence of technologies that will make the containment of disinformation – arguably already a failed mission – next to impossible, and it’s likely in Taiwan that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will be the target of destabilizing information from China.

The tools will likely overwhelm any fact checkers, moderators, and other defenses. The sheer volume will also make it more likely that they will dominate search engine results for all sorts of keywords and phrases, crowd out legitimate journalism and academic papers, and clog results with propaganda to their liking.

Tibet

Protesting Tibetans held in New Delhi

Tibetan flags. Photo: Colin Smith; WikiCommons.

The Tibet Review reports that a number of Tibetans have been “booked” for protesting outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi on the 64th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising on Mar 10.

It’s considered an unusual move.

Police in New Delhi have on numerous previous occasions released such protesting Tibetans, including during visits of top Chinese leaders, later on the same day. It is not clear why they have decided to put them on trial this time, especially after a police officer previously seemed to have indicated that no charges will be filed against them.

PTI news agency Mar 11 quoted a police officer as saying, “As they tried to jump over the barricades to reach the embassy, we detained them. Once the situation is under control, they will be released.”

It is not clear whether they indeed were released.

TYC is a grassroot organization based in Dharamshala, India, with local chapters in Tibetan communities across India and in cities in scores of other countries. The group campaigns for the restoration of Tibet’s independence from Chinese rule.

Coda

Numbers game

If you find this weird, ChinaDiction won’t hold it against you, but the idea is probably to prevent puerile jokes emerging on social media, like, I was voted into my new job with 2,592 for and with zero abstentions.

It’s the world’s biggest parliament and it votes as one. Photo: WikiCommons

Apart from granting Xi his third term, the “Two Sessions” have largely been about consolidating party power, setting military spending targets (up by 7.2%) and making China more self-reliant – oh, and setting a GDP growth target of 5%.

See all this against a background of the US increasingly – by the day, it sometimes seems – constraining Chinese technological and territorial expansion/projection.

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Xi takes rare direct aim at US

Speaking to China’s political elite, General Secretary Xi Jinping uncharacteristically let fly at perfidious foreign powers on Monday, fingering the US in particular as trying to deny China breathing space, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” Mr. Xi was quoted by state media as saying on Monday. 

By directly accusing the U.S. of seeking containment, a term loaded with Cold War meaning, Mr. Xi appears to be associating himself more closely with nationalist rhetoric—widely used by lower-ranking officials and state media—that attacks Washington, at a time when bilateral tensions continue to simmer over trade, technology, geopolitical influence and discordant views on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The English-language version of Mr. Xi’s speech reported by Xinhua didn’t refer to containment or the U.S. Instead, it quoted him telling fellow officials to “have the courage to fight as the country faces profound and complex changes in both the domestic and international landscape.”

Foreign minister warns of ‘inevitable conflict’

China Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Photo VOA via WikiCommons.

China and the US are unavoidably heading into conflict if the US doesn’t “hit the brakes” on its concerted efforts to “contain” China’s rise, Foreign Minister Qin Gang warned this week, The Guardian reports.

’If the US doesn’t hit the brakes and continues to barrel down the wrong track, no amount of guardrails can prevent the carriage from derailing and crashing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation,’ Qin Gang said on Tuesday.

Qin decried the US position that it was looking for peaceful solutions, arguing “in reality, the US side’s so-called competition is all-out containment and suppression, a zero-sum game where you die and I live.”

The minister also defended China’s close relationship with Russia, describing them as “an example for global foreign relations.”

‘With China and Russia working together, the world will have a driving force,’ he said. ‘The more unstable the world becomes the more imperative it is for China and Russia to steadily advance their relations.’

Exterminate the brutes!

The National Review reports that Chinese “wolf blogger” (who has been endorsed by Xi Jinping himself in the past) Zhou Xiaoping has called on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) to create a “blacklist” of Taiwan secessionists to be executed.

Zhou, in a post to the social-media site Weibo, discussed his CPPCC proposal to order the creation of a ‘Taiwan Province Separatist Forces Blacklist’ to be posted publicly, according to a translation of his post by Han [Yang, see below]. This would be a list of Taiwanese individuals to be hunted down and killed in the aftermath of an invasion.

Think of the CPPCC as a kind of shadowy consultative sister body to the CPC itself – it may not do much, but it’s very influential.

Australia-based political commentator and former Chinese diplomat Han Yang tweeted ahead of the National Review piece:

And there’s a Weibo link for readers of Chinese.

The buck stops here

Billionaire investor Mark Mobius is cautioning investors to be “very, very careful” about investing in China after he discovered he can’t get his money out of the country, reports Reuters.

‘I have an account with HSBC in Shanghai. I can't take my money out. The government is restricting flow of money out of the country,’ Mobius, founder of Mobius Capital Partners, told FOX Business in an interview published on March 2.

‘I can't get an explanation of why they're doing this ... They're putting all kinds of barriers. They don’t say: No, you can't get your money out. But they say: give us all the records from 20 years of how you made this money ... This is crazy."

Somebody should have warned Mobius before he dipped his toes into the China market that if you’re not prepared for “crazy” you’d better take your money elsewhere.

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The Greater Sinosphere

Australia

Red alert down under

Cartoon: the Global Times.

On Monday Australia woke to shock-horror headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age: “Red Alert” the broadsheets shouted; Australia faces the prospect of war with China within three years “and we’re not ready.”

This happens every now and again. Australia likes to imagine itself as living in harmony with its Asian neighbors, and it bristles at any suggestion that it’s a lackey of US hegemony, which makes the issue of US commitment to defending its first-island chain “client states” prickly.

Then some think tank, or some dusty old Sinologist, comes out and reminds everybody that being part of the Asia Pacific isn’t all holidays in Bali and raw minerals to China – not to mention “pan-Asia cuisine,” which is a thing Down Under (think Peking duck and phad Thai).

The old-school leftish Labor position is that if Australia keeps its head down and kowtows to almighty Beijing, it will all work out.

Take Paul Keating – retired but unable to shut up – for example, who refers to Taiwan as a “civil dispute,” as if the entire Taiwan issue can be shelved because it’s “between the Chinese,” no matter how loudly those pesky islanders shout, “But we’re not Chinese!”

In the meantime, to be sure there’s a lot of tabloid fear-mongering going on in the Herald/Age headline and the story, but it is time to switch gears and engage in rational discussion of the fact that if Taiwan falls it’s a total game-changer for the entire region and Australia is part of that – for the good times and the bad times.

It’s impossible to say whether Australia will be drawn into a war with China within three years, but if there’s a war with China – and it looks increasingly likely – Australia will be drawn into it, like it or not.

Being prepared. might not be such a bad idea.

Perth Mint caught ‘doping’ its bars

The one-tonne gold coin at the Perth Mint, if the latter is to be trusted. Photo: GordonMakryllos; WikiCommons.

Australia’s ABC reports that the “historic Perth Mint” is facing facing a potential A$9 billion (US$5.4 billion) recall of gold bars after selling diluted or "doped" bullion to China and then covering it up, according to a leaked internal report.

It’s something of a story and worth reading the ABC report in full, but basically the world’s biggest producer of newly minted gold – and the only government-backed mint in the world – began “doping” (adulterating in minute amounts) its gold to save money, or make more of it, depending on how you look at it, in 2018, but got caught by the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE).

If the complaints by SGE, the Perth Mint’s biggest client, prompt a recall and replacement, the ABC remarks “It would also be difficult for the mint and would likely require support from WA taxpayers.”

Hong Kong

Elizabeth Tang arrested after visiting imprisoned union leader husband

According to the HK Labor Rights Monitor, the General Secretary of International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) and former Chief Executive of Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), Elizabeth Tang Yin-ngor, was taken away after visiting her husband, imprisoned union leader, Lee Cheuk Yan.

Sources have alleged that Tang is arrested on suspicion that she had colluded with foreign forces to endanger national security. Tang had recently returned to Hong Kong after leaving the city to the United Kingdom in 2021. 

Petition calls for Oscars ban on HK star

‘Ip Man’ Donnie Yen, a big supporter of the CCP. Photo: Cecilia Wang; WikiCommons.

Close to 100,000 (at the time of writing) had signed a petition to remove Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen as an Oscars presenter on Sunday due to his support for the Chinese government.

Writes the BBC:

Yen is a globally recognised action star who recently drew controversy for an interview in which he called the protests a riot.

The 59-year-old is best known for the Ip Man movies, a Hong Kong series based on a martial arts master which has grossed more than US$400m (£338m) at the worldwide box office. He will next appear alongside Keanu Reeves in Hollywood film John Wick 4.

Reports VICE:

‘He’s made it clear he wants to use films as a medium to tell positive stories of China and Hong Kong. He’s helping to whitewash the Chinese regime,’ Henry Tong, a Taiwan-based democracy advocate from Hong Kong who started the petition, told VICE World News. Tong joined large-scale protests in 2019 demanding greater freedoms in Hong Kong and is among tens of thousands of residents who have since left the city amid a crackdown on civil liberties, including curbs on free speech. 

If you’re new to Yen, as ChinaDiction is, and need an instant opinion on the popular actor, he sided with the CCP against pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and was appointed to the National Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference as a representative of Hong Kong’s art and culture sector in January this year.

Even the Oscars’ organizers should know better, one would think … possibly.

Taiwan

Tsai to meet House Speaker in California

The Financial Times reports that Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (Cài Yīngwén, 蔡英文) “has convinced US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to meet in California rather than Taipei.”

The thinking, apparently, is that this will lessen China’s ire – something China generally has no shortage of … and at the least provocation.

Washington has been rife with speculation about whether McCarthy would visit Taipei. Advocates of a trip say senior US lawmakers should show support for the country in the face of rising Chinese aggression, while critics argue that high-profile visits provoke China without helping Taiwan.

A senior Taiwanese official said Tsai’s administration had provided McCarthy’s team with “some intelligence about what the Chinese Communist party is recently up to and the kinds of threats they pose”.

Liu Pengyu, the Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington, said China rejected all forms of official interaction between the US and Taiwan. “No matter [if] it is the Taiwan leaders coming to the United States or the US leaders visiting Taiwan, it could lead to another serious collision in the China-US relationship,” Liu said.

Let’s cut to the quick: The US House Speaker flying to Taiwan, the Taiwan president flying to the US: one is as bad as the other in China’s eyes.

No easy fix for southern Taiwan water shortages

The Zengwen Reservoir back in 2010, when water shortages were as much a problem as they are today. Photo: Pat Cullen; WikiCommons.

Water levels at the Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫), which is key to supplying water to Chiayi and Tainan in southern Taiwan, have dropped to just 19% of capacity and may only have enough supplies for another 20 days reports the Taiwan News.

The 20 days is hyperbole. As the Water Resources Agency (WRA) points out, there are other reservoirs that supply the South, but the situation this year is unusually bad because:

A prolonged drought has contributed to the dangerously low levels of the reservoir. The amount of rainfall in the south hit a 30-year-low in 2022, and the region has seen no precipitation surpassing 200 millimeters for more than 570 days, said the WRA.

Reduced water pressure has been implemented for Tainan and Chiayi, with water restrictions to kick in in Kaohsiung starting Wednesday (March 8) as part of an emergency response. Well drilling and halted irrigation, among other measures, are being taken to avoid a red water alert, meaning water rationing, for Tainan.

The Taipei Times has an interesting think piece by a former WRA section head on what can and should be done. It makes for sobering reading.

Taiwan has approved just one new large-scale reservoir project, the Niaozueitan (鳥嘴潭) artificial lake, which leaves de-silting the existing reservoirs and raising the height of their dams. De-silting is expensive and time consuming.

As for the Zengwen dam, it has already been heightened by 3 meters, “thus increasing its capacity by about 55 million cubic meters for a cost of just NT$200 million.”

But for that to be of any use, southern Taiwan is going to need rain – a lot of it.

Triad holds spring bash at the Marriott

The qipao brigade in waiting for the mob at Taipei’s Marriott Hotel. Photo: Twitter.

The United Daily News (Chinese) was less interested in the fact that renowned triad group the Bamboo Union was holding its spring banquet at the Marriott Hotel than by the presence of up to 170 辣妹 “spicy little sisters,” or simply “babes” dressed in traditional qipao at the event.

As it happened, the Bamboo Union holding a daytime party in one of Taipei’s most exclusive hotels was enough to create a furore, with legislators declaring themselves to be “shocked” that the underworld could act with such brazen and arrogant impunity.

Inevitably, the story began to leak into the international press, which actually takes an interest in Taiwan these days.

Director of Police Huang Mingzhao (Huáng Míngzhāo,黃明昭) said that the police have “absolutely zero tolerance for underworld gangs,” and they will strictly deal with any violation of the law.

Premier Chen Chien-jen (Chén Jiànrén, 陳建仁) yesterday ordered police to redouble efforts against organized crime, saying that incidents like the Marriott event “created bad optics and openly insulted Taiwan's law enforcement authorities,’ reports Focus Taiwan.

No doubt the mob will choose a more discrete venue next year.

Tibet

In old Lhasa, a warren of tales

Old Lhasa book cover. Camphor Press.

I confess to not having read “Old Lhasa: A Biography” (Camphor Books), but it’s on my list, and in the meantime China Underground has an interview with the author, MA Aldritch, who had to reduce his time spent on the ground to a minimum due to China’s highly restrictive rules on visiting the High Plateau.

I launched myself into a campaign of researching about all aspects of Lhasa. This ranged from its urban design, to religious festivals, to food and beverages, to ghosts and goblins, to political disputes, to traditional architecture, to legends and myths.

Next I booked tours through an authorized Chinese travel agent and obtained official approval for my itinerary. This is a mandatory step since foreign independent travel is prohibited. My itineraries served as a “road map” to historic and cultural sites in and around Lhasa.

Surprisingly, I was able to wander around Lhasa on my own during my tour’s off hours and explore the Tibetan Quarter, which is geographically and symbolically the heart of Old Lhasa. (New Lhasa is the modern monstrosity that has been expansively built up around the old city in the past seventy years.)

Coda

Public transport for pets

The ETtoday report has some fascinating details on how public transport for pets will work in Taipei, with the pets getting pet behavior trainers and veterinarians in their specialized carriages to ensure their welfare.

It actually sounds so good, it’s likely the problem will be keeping the humans out.