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.

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.

1/9

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

2/9

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...

3/9

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...

4/9

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.

5/9

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...

Who goes to work for China’s defense industry? In our latest, @emily_sw1 and I mapped talent flows between 🇨🇳 universities and defense SOEs.

🚨 We found that U.S. tech companies are indirectly aiding China's military.

Thread: (1/10)

2/10 In our report for @CSETGeorgetown, we measured the relationships between elite 🇨🇳 universities and China's defense industry by looking at their Graduate Employment Quality Reports.

Kudos to @alexjoske @ASPI_org for highlighting these sources:

3/10 We looked at disaggregated employment data for 29 of 45 leading universities—China’s Double First Class universities + those administered by MIIT.

Our dataset reflects the career moves of 140,000 Chinese university graduates in 2019.

6,000 took jobs at defense SOEs.

4/10 We confirmed that 🇨🇳 defense giants like CASC, CETC, and CSIC disproportionately recruit from seven universities: the Seven Sons of National Defense (国防七子).

The Seven Sons produced just 16% of graduates in our dataset, but 72% of those who took jobs at defense SOEs.

5/10 Then we started looking into the resources available to Chinese universities, investigating documents from the Ministry of Education.

MOE frequently "asks" foreign companies to help Chinese universities in research & curriculum development—the price of doing business in 🇨🇳.

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. *****

Thread:

1. Who runs Taiwan's media? For the longest time, I've said that Taiwanese media is just US MSM translated into Chinese, regardless of whether it is pan-blue (KMT-leaning) or pan-green (DPP-leaning). Below is a breakdown of some shareholder information.

2. Significant shareholders of Eastern Media International Corp (東森國際), which runs ETTV, a pan-blue station, include Dimensional Fund Advisors, Mackenzie Financial, and Northern Trust Investments. They would never lie about US imperialism, right?

3. One of the biggest shareholders of pan-green Sanlih E-Television (三立電視) is Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠), who runs Fubon Financial Holdings (富邦金控). You might know Fubon as the bank that bought up Taipei city government-controlled Taipeibank.

4. Fubon's shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Dimensional Fund Advisors. Look these companies up. They would certainly never want TV stations they control to lie about what bourgeois governments do, right?

5. The biggest shareholder of Formosa Television (民視), which was founded by the DPP, is managing dir. Chen Ching-fu (陳清福), who is incidentally the CEO of Ve Wong Corporation (味王), a food company, whose sharehldrs include Dimensional Fund Advisors & SSgA Funds Management