December 18, 2022
From a Twitter thread I wrote on October 14, 2012: 1. I’m reading “Red Roulette” by Desmond Shum. While it’s fascinating, I’m a bit concerned that people will read it and think that is how all business in China gets done. Some thoughts: 2. Shum describes a business world in China in which connections to […]
December 18, 2022
From a Twitter thread I wrote on July 24, 2020: 1. I’m often asked, if I’m so critical of Trump’s approach to China, what I think the US *should* do … with the assumption I’ll be stumped, because I have nothing to offer. So let me answer that question, perhaps not exhaustively, but in some […]
December 18, 2022
From a thread I posted on Twitter on February 27, 2022: 1. Some thoughts on the strategic relationship between Russia and China. A thread. The current closeness between the two is basically driven by two factors: 2. First, and this predates Xi, is China’s concern about the vulnerability of its supply lines, particularly oil, to […]
December 16, 2022
Part 2: Attempts at Reconciliation (May 5 – May 19) May 5, 1989 – China was mainly quiet in the wake of the large marches in multiple cities the day before, to commemorate the May 4th Movement of 1919. Western newspapers, including the New York Times, reported on the previous day’s protests. May 6, 1989 […]
December 16, 2022
In the spring of 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Protests, I began a project of live-tweeting the events and images of the protests and crackdown, day by day, moment by moment. The tweets that followed, over the next month and half, provide an interesting sense of how events ebbed and flowed […]
December 14, 2022
In December 2012, I had an article in Foreign Policy magazine that summarized what seemed at the time, and many years since, as a somewhat arcane topic — a standoff between US and Chinese regulators over audit standards. In fact, in December 2020 (eight years later), Congress passed a bill that threatened to delist Chinese companies from […]
December 14, 2022
On August 3, 2022, in the wake of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, I tweeted a brief thread providing some perspective on Taiwan’s history. Since people seemed to appreciate the conciseness of its style and content, I repost that thread here, in its original form: 1. The attention surrounding Pelosi’s trip has prompted a […]
December 14, 2022
This op-ed of mine was published in the Wall Street Journal on September 12, 2012. You can read below or view the original here. At the very last moment, one paragraph was cut from the final version, presumably due to space limitations. I have restored it here in italics, because the crisis facing Suntech (the world’s largest […]
December 14, 2022
This article of mine appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review in June 2009. To my knowledge, it was the first article that proposed the now-commonplace observation that Chinese citizens were purchasing and stockpiling empty apartments as a form of savings. Though many later assumed that I had predicted an imminent crash in Chinese real estate that […]
August 13, 2009
From August 13, 2009 It’s with a heavy heart that I read a report by Time’s correspondents that Chinese authorities have nearly completed bulldozing the ancient quarter of Kashgar, an oasis on the Silk Road in the far western province of Xinjiang. Old Kashgar and its famed Sunday market (which I’ve heard has also been shut down) […]