THREAD: Last week, China’s Cabinet announced that, for the first time, fees will be charged for “excessive” freedom of information requests, potentially meaning huge out-of-pocket expenses for lawyers and others who rely heavily on public information from the Chinese government.

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China is aging so rapidly that it urgently needs to address the problem of a rapidly declining work force in a slowly declining population. To give an idea of relative population changes among the three most populous countries, today

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are 4.3 Chinese for every American and 4.7 Chinese of working age (ages 15-64), while there is just over 1 Chinese for every Indian and 1.1 Chinese of working age.

By the end of the century, however, there are expected to be 2.5 Chinese for every American and...

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just 2.4 Chinese of working age, while there will be 1.4 Indians for every Chinese and 1.5 Indians of working age. Over the rest of this century, in other words, while China’s population declines quite rapidly relative to that of the two other most populous countries, it...

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also switches from having a much better dependency ratio than either to having a worse one than either, with far more of its dependents being the elderly rather than children. In effect its working age population will drop by half relative to those of the other two.

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This is going to be a very tough problem to resolve, although to the extent China succeeds, it will be very useful as an example for other countries. I am not sure they are going about it the right way, however. Making seniors make better use of smart technology sounds...

Here is (for whoever may be interested) the list of books on China that I have read in the past 5-6 years;
in no particular order, with my assessments: 5 stars is the best, 2 the worst.
Books I reviewed on my blog are noted with ++.

John Palmer, The death of Mao, Faber & Faber, 2012 **
Jonathan Fenby, Will China dominate the 21st century, Polity, 2014 ***
Quan Yanchi, Mao: Man, not God ***
Jacques Gernet, Daily life in China on the Eve of Mongol Invasion 1250-76, Stanford UP, 1962. ****

++Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, Verso, 2007. *****
Minxin Pei, China’s crony capitalism, Harvard UP, 2016. ****
Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, Harvard UP, 2006. ***

++Martin Jacques, When China rules the world, Penguin, 2012. *****
Cheng Li, Chinese politics in the Xi Jinping era, Brookings, 2016. ***
++Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China, Harvard 2017. ****

Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the state, Simon and Schuster, 2009. ****
++Wang fan-hsi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, Columbia UP, 1991. *****
++Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, Princeton UP, 2000. *****

As someone who actually grew up in China in 1980s, I can actually talked abt how commemoration of Nanjing Massacre changed inside China. I will make a thread

I was born in Oct 1976. 1 month after Mao died. I went to elementary school in China in 1982. my 1st to 4th grade was during honeymoon period btw Japan and China. We learn abt horrors of Hiroshima bombing and how Japan was a victim of US Imperialism

1985 was a pivotal year in Sino-Japanese relations. On the 40the year of Japanese surrender, Japanese PM Yasuhiro Nakasone visited Yasukuni shrine for the 1st time after WW2 Japanese war criminals had been enshrined there in 1978.

Another development was discovery in 1980s of 1 the most notorious Japanese war crime: Unit 731, biological and chemical weapon research unit of Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal live human experiments on Chinese and Allied prisoners in China

In 1986, the 1st mainland China film on KMT fighting Japan, 血战台儿庄abt Battle of Tai'erzhuang, 1st major Chinese victory over Japan immediately aft Nanjiang Massacre came out. I learn abt Nanjing Massacre that year, I was 10.

Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.

🇨🇳 🇨🇳 Situation Update, Dec. 6th –China owns DOMINION, and controls all the officials who run the machines at every level of government.

✅ Dominion is owned by communist China,which also runs the tech giants, the left-wing media and most of the Democrats in Congress
[M. Adams]

1. “Dominion’s Parent Company Arranges $400 Million Placement 1 Month Before Election: SEC Filing” – The Epoch Times:

2. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that UBS Securities LLC arranged a private placement of $400 million with Staple Street Capital III, L.P. on October 8, 2020.

Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm located in New York, purchased

3. Dominion Voting systems on July 17, 2018, for an undisclosed amount.

The securities firm that arranged the transaction, UBS Securities LLC, is a division of UBS Americas Inc, which ultimately falls under UBS Group AG, a company listed on the SIX Swiss stock exchange.

4. Three of four board members of UBS Securities LLC are Chinese according to Bloomberg, at least one of whom appears to reside in Hong Kong.

One of them is Ye Xiang, a Chinese national who also served as a board member of the Beijing-based UBS subsidiary.