Tweets of the Month

Weapons of Ego Destruction, Demographics, Technocracy, Jonathan Spence

Tessa Alexanian @tessafyi

I'm obsessed with this animation of human population relative to modern nations since 10000 BCE. India grows steadily, China jumps up and down, Mexico collapses in 1500 after being 3rd largest for millennia... There's so much here! It's wild! Source: reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti…

January 4th 2022

5 Retweets12 Likes

Tianyu M. Fang @tianyuf

Peak Chinese technocracy is Xi'an gov't urging people not to show their health codes 'unless necessary' because of server overload

December 20th 2021

9 Retweets85 Likes

Gregory Adam Scott 史瑞戈 😾 @sudasana

@bokane I always show this image the first day of my Classical Chinese class

January 10th 2022

14 Retweets81 Likes

eileen chengyin chow @chowleen

Winner of 2020’s new kanji contest in Japan: the character 座 (seat), ingeniously redesigned as a neologism for “social distance.” Note the two 人(person) radicals in the original 座are now positioned farther away from one another! Runners up: sousaku-kanji.com/?fbclid=IwAR2q…

December 27th 2020

1,644 Retweets4,261 Likes

A fantastic thread

Jordan Schneider @jordanschnyc

New plan: I want to stitch together voice memos of folks’ reflections on Spence for an episode. Looking for a wide range of perspectives from colleagues and PhD students to simply fans of his books. Please dm or email me at jorschneider@gmail.com

Jordan Schneider @jordanschnyc

Seems like there’s a moment in everyone’s China-watching journey where they read their first Jonathan Spence book and immediately drop everything else they’re doing so they can devour the corpus. Would love to do a retrospective ep, who wants to be a guest? https://t.co/lwvHDCsTrP

December 27th 2021

6 Retweets14 Likes

Offer still stands: please email me your recollections to jorschneider@gmail.com. Here’s a guide to recording a voice memo.

Also, I’m having Paul Kennedy on ChinaTalk next week to discuss his 40-year friendship with Jonathan Spence and whatever else I can come up with. Let me know what I should ask.

Joseph Torigian @JosephTorigian

Now that @e_sarotte has written a book using extensive new archival documents and interview material to investigate NATO expansion, I hope someone writes a similar book on engagement with China in the 1990s.

M.E. Sarotte @e_sarotte

Thank you @FT, @frederick65, and @battlelaura for selecting NOT ONE INCH as a "Book to Read in 2022." It's an honor to be on this list with @gideonrachman, @Yascha_Mounk, and many other great writers... https://t.co/pt3WQiYCNd @yalepress @YaleBooks

December 29th 2021

1 Retweet19 Likes

Write this book and I will cover it on ChinaTalk!

Propagandopolis @propagandopolis

“Let’s study military technique to ensure victory” — Spanish poster published by the Communist Party in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1937).

December 14th 2021

22 Retweets126 Likes

Brendan O'Kane @bokane

finally figured out what to get everybody this year

December 14th 2021

25 Retweets154 Likes

Air-Moving Device @AirMovingDevice

A thread on TikTok-Douyin decoupling (or lack thereof) thru some fun OSINT sleuthing: Having read recent reports on ties between TikTok and DouYin(/Bytedance), which mostly relied on indirect evidence, I wanted to see if I could find some more direct data. (1/n)

December 13th 2021

80 Retweets211 Likes

Air-Moving Device @AirMovingDevice

Last year, I stumbled upon a group of TikTok accounts used by China-based Bytedance software/testing engineers to test various aspects of the app. This week, I expanded the list to ~1,300 by looking at accounts followed by/following known accounts. (2/n)

December 13th 2021

21 Likes

Thread. Air Moving Device doing god’s work…

JP Kleinhans @JPKleinhans

Good news everybody! The excellent @J_B_C16 and I teamed up (again!) to analyze what #China's rise in #semiconductors means for #EU. It's not 60 pages and 300 references like the last one (sorry). Reading this are 20min well spent, promise! stiftung-nv.de/en/node/3187

December 8th 2021

25 Retweets58 Likes

Best think tank cover art of 2021. And a good paper to boot!

Xifan Yang 杨希璠 @yangxifan

Being rich in China is no funny business: "Among the 72 billionaires, 15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, seven died from accidents, 14 were executed according to the law and 19 died from diseases." Subscribe to read | Financial TimesNews, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publicationft.com

November 30th 2021

438 Retweets1,189 Likes

Mule @FoolAllTheTime

Reading more books about writing hits different now that I do it a lot more. My drafts (of which I have so many) always die of momentum “The best is when it’s fresh and too hot to handle” 😂

November 28th 2021

2 Retweets29 Likes

Dr Anton Howes @antonhowes

Just thinking about how much this shelf would have been worth in England in the year 1600. Presumably at least tens of millions in today’s money.

November 27th 2021

412 Retweets5,113 Likes

Razven @RazvenHK

Taiwan: We live in a society.

November 19th 2021

81 Retweets464 Likes

Moss on Stone @MossonStone1

Chinese Pamphlets 1947-1954 - There is a wonderful collection of PRC pamphlets hosted on the CRL Digital Delivery System. dds.crl.edu/search/collect…

November 13th 2021

52 Retweets161 Likes

Zheng Ma @textangel

Broken Ink Landscape Sesshu Toyo (Muromachi Period 1420-1506) 雪舟等楊・破墨山水図

January 16th 2022

3 Likes