We're now in a very special farm in Liaoning province called "Tanbo Art Kingdom" where they make drawings in rice fields out of different varieties of rice.
This is day 32 of our RV road trip in Northeast China and... it ends today 😭
So time to do a little retrospective. This is a 🧵 with the highlights of our trip.
As a reminder we're a Sino-French family of 4 who rented a RV in Shenyang and proceeded to tour the 4 provinces of… https://t.co/JbmoggRq9Stwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Day 1, July 13th. Just to get the hang of the RV, we do a relatively short trip from Shenyang to MeiHeKou, where we discover an awesome night market ( ) and a very charming little village built during the cultural revolution (https://t.co/th3i0E8ecJ ).
Day 2. We drive from MeiHeKou to Changbai mountains. We pick fresh blueberries in a small farm ( ), eat TieGuoDun and watch a show in a great local restaurant (https://t.co/MLfbbWW41g ) and sleep next to a flower field (https://t.co/D5CWgczxvc )
2) the Chinese government enjoys strong public support
3) Mutual trust between people in China is among the highest in the world
4) the government is perceived to be highly responsive
5) Chinese citizens are politically active and enjoy a strong feeling of political efficacy
You could also come to China, spend some time here, speak to the local population and understand that those "surprises" aren't in fact all that surprising.
They're just surprises if you've only ever understood China through the prism of Western media...
Everything looks Russian but... we're still in China!
That's because we're in a Russian village in the outskirts of Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province. https://t.co/9pb9xxPXpttwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
This is the exact spot
The Petrov Art Palace, where we're about to step in to watch a performance
Yesterday we had a short layover in Beijing where we jumped on the opportunity to visit the National Museum of China, where they keep some of the most precious treasures of ancient China.
A few items we saw 🧵
The famous sculpture of a Han dynasty dwarf "Pai You" (jester?)
An incredible Han dynasty 2,000 years old rhinoceros wine vessel
1st "truth": "analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past".
Allison reminds that India's rise has been predicted for decades (just as China's downfall) but the optimistic (or pessimistic in the case of China) predictions were always proven wrong.
2nd truth: "despite India's growth, India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s" and the gap between both has actually considerably widened in China's favor.
Here Allison shares 3 graphs that dramatically illustrate this.
Interesting, the Pentagon dismisses the WSJ story of a planned "secret Chinese spy station" on Cuba as fake news: "it's not accurate, we are not aware of China and Cuba developing a new type of spy station". usnews.com/news/world/art…
The story smelled very fishy to start with, since it reported on an "agreement in principle" between China and Cuba to build the station ⬇️, which means there was no actual agreement .
And also there's the fact that the WSJ has had an appallingly bad record on China lately with this ⬇️ or the fake Amnesty International story on the Uyghur student detained in HK when he had in fact never left South Korea.