Even after 1,000 days to get used to the idea -- 1,000 days of Canada's two Michaels being held as hostages in China -- I'm still totally shocked that one of the world's 2 superpowers has so brazenly used political hostage-taking, and has now gotten away with it.
I'm thrilled for the families of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig that their long dark night is now over. But I'm terrified of what this means for the political norms of the world to come.
It's one thing for a certain regional power in the Middle East to do this (you know what country I mean). Like 3 countries in the world look to that regime as a model.
But China will shape the norms of the 21st century and likely beyond. What it does, it normalizes globally.
The US has also done very bad things, you say! Yes! True! But we also have an independent press, which is how you know about those bad things, & an independent judiciary, to sometimes make those things illegal, & a 2-party system, where one party can lambast the other's mistakes.
China has none of those things. Literally zero of those things.
To be clear, China's hostage diplomacy did not WORK, at least in the short run, in this case. Meng Wanzhou was released for legal reasons, not political ones, as far as I can tell. But China does appear to have gotten away with it, again at least in the short run.
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For many months now, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been sending out email blasts almost every day condemning China's actions in Xinjiang and calling for specific actions, such as canceling the Hilton hotel project being built over a bulldozed mosque.
Some takeaways:
1) This is America's largest Muslim advocacy org. Hopefully we're not going to hear anyone else saying "Why aren't Muslims condemning this"
2) CAIR is among the loudest voices fighting Islamophobia in US. They also have strong commitment to intersectionality, frequently offering support for Black activists & condemning anti-AAPI attacks.
They both support Asian Americans & condemn CCP authoritarianism.
Scoop: The Bush Foundation for US-China Relations accepted $5 million from a Chinese Community Party-linked policy organization known for its efforts to make U.S. policy discussions more Beijing-friendly.
Axios obtained a written agreement that spells out the details of a $5 million grant from the China-United States Exchange Foundation to the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, established in 2017 with the former president's blessing.
This grant was not previously public and was not disclosed through U.S. filings.
Tax filings from May-Dec 2019 show Bush China Foundation brought in a total of $1.2 million in contributions, meaning CUSEF's donations would likely comprise a substantial portion of its revenue.
Strongly agree. It's difficult, from the outside, to distinguish genuine nationalist sentiment among Chinese students abroad, from Chn govt incentives to display nationalism.
Best approach: Be aware of these incentives AND that many Chinese students genuinely very nationalist.
There's a risk here, though. We always try hard to distinguish between the CCP/Chinese govt and Chinese people, to avoid blaming innocent people for a bad govt.
But when those people strongly support that govt's bad policies and decisions--things get real complicated real quick
In some ways—if the goal is to prevent average Americans from thinking all Chinese people are scary, and IF we know that only simplistic messages will trickle down to average ppl—I'd almost rather that simple message be: Chinese people are victims and govt is bad.
Perhat Tursun is a prominent modernist writer in Xinjiang whose work is inspired by Kafka and Rumi — and who is now serving a 16-year sentence in a Chinese prison.
In Beijing the 1980s, Perhat led a Uyghur student group that met twice weekly to discuss literature, and the "books he was introducing to us were completely different from what we had ever read before — Kafka, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky," his friend Tahir Hamut Izgil told me.
Perhat's own writings explored symbolism and modernist themes in new ways, inspiring devoted fans as well as critics.
"So few people can give Uyghur literature that aesthetic sense," Tahir said. "He is truly unique. There is no one like him."
This is a masterful retelling of the history of the People's Republic of China, through the eyes of its diplomats.
Bloomberg reporter Peter Martin paints a deeply human portrait of China's emissaries, pulling back the veil on their motivations and struggles.
Peter draws on dozens of interviews and more than 100 Chinese-language memoirs, digging up wild anecdotes and occasional glimpses into the personalities and true feelings of China's diplomats as they navigated career, politics, bureaucracy and the rest of the world.