T. Greer Profile picture
Sep 10 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
An interesting review with which I partially agree. Especially this point: "These are not traits of engineers but of Communists." Image
But I also think communists are especially susceptible to think of problems in terms of engineering, and this has been true for a very long time (eg. Stalin's "Engineers of the soul").
Something that does make Chinese party frames interesting is how often they rely on engineering concepts and metaphors. Outside of Marxist theory, the *most* common source of metaphors and concepts come from the military domain; the second most common source is probably ancient
Chinese thought. But after that I'd wager the most common set of imported frames come from engineering--especially systems engineering.

And that is very different from Western politicians, and in some ways is different from other communist parties.
There was a bit in the '60s-'70s where cybernetics was popular across the Eastern bloc, but the Chinese party leadership today is always talking about "systems of systems" &the like.

Sometimes I think they are using these concepts wrong--but the point here is that they are used.

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More from @Scholars_Stage

Sep 1
1. The LDS faith is a minority faith in every country in which it exists (except Tonga).

2.a The majority of the Church lives outside the US
2.b Many Americans in the Church served missions outside the US
2.c Or served missions aimed at foreign language populations within US
(That is how I learned Khmer, btw!)

3. The LDS experience in these other cultures is that their institutions and way of living can be successfully planted and replicated among these diverse populations. Church meetings and communities in Virginia feel similar to those in Taiwan.
I suspect that this lived experience, even more than Church teachings about all men and women being children of God, is the most important shaper of the views of the LDS faithful.
Read 17 tweets
Aug 25
How the Chinese consulate in New York has unseated multiple city and state level politicians they do not like Image
@PekingMike et al. in the New York Times: nytimes.com/2025/08/25/nyr…
@PekingMike Chinese diplomats leading Chinese community groups in joint oath ceremonies where participants state their commitment to safeguarding the motherland and making China great once more Image
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Read 5 tweets
Aug 24
These are extremely good textbooks.

Pedagogically unique--very different from most mathematics texts.

If you come from a humanist background or otherwise worry that you don't "get" math, I strongly recommend these. Image
Image
I also recommend them if you passed through these classes without ever feeling like you understood, at a deeper level, why you were doing the manipulations you were doing. Braver will fix that.
The key to the book are carefully scaffolded problem sets not designed to test knowledge so much as to lead the reader/problem solver to discover truths themselves. Some of his best problems will be something like "10. Now go explain this concept to another human being."
Read 12 tweets
Aug 22
To be fair my thread does not engage with the new piece so much as with Kang's broader ouvre.

The two connect in the new piece's implicit answer to a key question: If China is stronger than the United States how do you expect it will behave?
Implicit in the piece is that the best model for this future China is either periods of Chinese weakness in more recent history or to its relationship with other neoconfucian powers when itself was a strong neoconfucian empire.
My thread explains why the second precedent is no convincing to me; the first just strikes me as obviously unwise.
Read 45 tweets
Aug 21
I think the time has come for me to write my take on @daveckang's entire research ouvre--its strengths and the limitations I find in its central arguments.

I do think that his new piece in IO really rests on ideas and assumptions of this earlier work, even if they are not cited.
Essentially I think all of these books, and the many articles that precede them, are variations on a central theme -- a thesis about Chinese statecraft that extends back several thousand years but is rooted in concerns about the present. Image
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The concern with the present is this: Kang is worried, and has been worried for two decades, about the possibility of war between America and China.
Read 81 tweets
Aug 19
Tell me if I read this paper wrong. It does not disprove the claim that industrialization depended on cotton grown by slaves.

Rather, advances the claim that there would have been even *greater* economic growth had it depended on free labor instead of slave labor for cotton.
It seems like the claim "absent slavery industrialization and capitalism would have gone chugging along just fine, thank you, and probably would have grown faster" seems different to me than "slavery did not play a decisive role in American/British industrialization."
Maybe there is a motte bailey thing here, though each side has its own motte and its own bailey. One side wants to claim that industrial capitalism could have only been created via slavery. This is wrong.
Read 5 tweets

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