That's incredible: Baidu last year set up a driverless taxi service in Wuhan and a few other places called "Carrot Run" (萝卜快跑), and the experiment is proving super popular with already 6 million rides completed with a fleet of just 1,000 cars.

The main reason is cost: without a driver and able to operate 24/7, it costs only 1/3rd of the price of a taxi or Uber. The cost paid by users is between RMB0.5 to RMB1.0 per km ($0.07 to $0.14) which is INSANELY cheap. With such a service, a drive between Boston and NYC (348 km) would set you back between $24 and $48, in your own private taxi!

Another added benefit is that they've set up the cars so that customers can sing karaoke or watch movies in the back (something you can't exactly do in a typical Uber). And safety-wise it's also proving much better than human drivers with no major accident in 100 million kilometers travelled.

So obviously a better experience from a consumer standpoint and it'll doubtlessly become the norm in a few years. Which of course raises questions with regards to jobs: millions if not tens of millions of people in China live off driving (taxis, delivery, etc.) so we're looking at quite a disruption if all those jobs get replaced by AI. And at the pace at which China moves, it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

Sources

mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzU2OT…
wap.xxsb.com/content/2024-0… More details 👇 In Wuhan they're allowed to cover 40% of the city

https://x.com/Forward_2020/status/1810304127945109925?t=-iXGYV4ZKa-_3MANlVpaEQ&s=19

The most important event in the world yesterday wasn't the disastrous presidential debate in the US, but it was the 70th anniversary of the 5 Principles of Peaceful Coexistence happening in Beijing.

I was lucky enough to be attending in person.

A 🧵

First of all, what are the 5 principles of peaceful coexistence, and why do they matter?

The principles were first proposed by China for the purpose of the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement, also called the Panchsheel Agreement.

They are:

Whenever I want to be reminded of what a wise politician sounds like, I listen to George Yeo, the former Foreign Minister of Singapore (he was Singaporean cabinet minister during 21 years!).

A small 🧵 with video extracts from a talk he made at @AsiaSocietyNY recently.

Here he explains why it's "troubling" that the US keeps making the remark that they won't become number 2, "because it suggests that the US will do everything it can to prevent China from being number 1".

All the more troubling because:
- "China is prepared to accept the US for what it is"
- "It is completely unrealistic" for the US to think it can "change China". He sees US aspirations to change China as "hope built on an illusion [which] can only lead to one outcome: to tragedy".
- "China doesn't want to be number one politically, [...] it doesn't want to take on the burden of being the global hegemon, the global policeman". So "in a multipolar world, the US can still be Primus Inter Pares, first among equals, because of the English languages, because of standards, because the US itself is a metasystem." Here Yeo relates a powerful anecdote where the Secretary to Pope John Paul II wrote in a speech: "despite our diversity, we are one".

The Pope asked to replace the word "despite" with "because". Yeo interpreted it as meaning: "we are one only because we respect that each of us is unique, that each culture is unique, that each country is unique. If we want as a condition of the relationship that the other person should be like us, that's not a relationship, that's a dictatorship."

The Economist: "China has become a scientific superpower"

Rare for me - maybe even unprecedented - to praise the Economist but this might be the seminal article on the current status of China's scientific might.

Let's take a look 🧵
economist.com/science-and-te… Firstly, surprising that The Economist would publish this, given how much they've pushed the "China collapse" narrative over the years, and how negative they've always been about the country.

Maybe they figured that at some point they could only get away with so much...

These have undoubtedly been the wildest 72 hours in French politics in my lifetime. Pretty incredible stuff.

A 🧵 So after losing big time in the EU elections to Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly, calling the French to elect new MPs on the 30th of June 👇

https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1799913647109779922

This FT article by former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy @ElbridgeColby is insane, it puts us straight back to the 19th century.


He literally proposes a plan for continued Western domination of the world that would involve a war on 2 fronts against both China and Russia. He writes that the US should focus all its military might on Asia to ensure it has primacy there over China, and fight a war for that purpose if need be, and Europe should rearm in a massive way to face Russia. As he explains it, poor little America doesn't have enough resources for global domination on its own anymore, which is why it needs help by rearming Europe so they can share the burden.

That's it, that's the gist of the article.

Which makes the "America must face reality" title for the piece deeply ironic and cynical: what "reality" are we talking about here? Because I think that over 90% of the planet wouldn't quite agree that this way of seeing the world is "facing reality". Quite the contrary, they'd argue it's holding on to a deeply troubling imperialist and supremacist vision of the world that has historically caused untold suffering...

It gets better. Why should the US, and not China, be the dominant power in China's region, you ask? Because see, America can't afford a "potentially hostile power dominating the most important industrialised region of the world" (actual quote from the article).

It doesn't matter apparently that Asia is "the most important industrialised region of the world" in huge parts THANKS TO CHINA! 🤦 In other words it's akin to saying "thanks guys for building such a vibrant economy in this place, we'll take it from here..."

Another hilarious yet deeply depressing part of the article is when he describes China as "doing almost everything consistent with preparing for a war with America". Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, this is China "facing the reality" that it's surrounded by US military bases and facing an America that keeps repeating its primary goal is to contain them and building multiple military alliances with their neighbors for that very purpose? Isn't it in the realm of possibilities that it might have something to do with that? And that as such the solution isn't upping the ante with yet more military buildup around China? How would the US react if China were to somehow decide that the US couldn't be the dominant player in America and were to progressively encircle the place militarily, making military alliances with Mexico and Canada: wouldn't it "do almost everything consistent with preparing for a war with China"?

Anyhow, conclusion: I feel like eating crazy pills when reading articles like this. But I, and the world at large, need to "face the reality" that this is America today: a power dominated by an extremely aggressive imperialist ideology. And we shouldn't resign ourselves to this, we need to do our outmost to call it out and stop this insanity before it's too late and they trigger the devastating world war they're actively preparing for.ft.com/content/b423aa… Colby says I "caricature" his article without being specific how, so it's hard to reply...

I invite everyone to read the article and judge for themselves.

https://x.com/ElbridgeColby/status/1793882888750137368?t=W9r76XqXJvns93Lv4sic_g&s=19

Georgia seems to be the latest battleground between the "rules-based order" and international law.


The Georgian parliament passed a “foreign agents” bill whereby media or civil society groups in Georgia that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad will have to register as “organisations serving the interests of a foreign power”.

Which should be entirely uncontroversial as it is completely in line with the UN Charter - the bedrock of international law - which prohibits foreign meddling into other countries' internal affairs.

Yet the US state department has called the bill “Kremlin-inspired”, said it violated "EU norms" and made all kinds of threats against Georgia over it. For instance US assistant secretary of state Jim O’Brien warned that the US was prepared to sanction Georgian government ministers and officials over it: “If the law advances against EU norms and there is an erosion of democracy and violence against peaceful demonstrators, we will see restrictions from the United States. There will be financial and/or travel restrictions specifically on those responsible and their families.”

The European Commission on Tuesday also said that the new law would undermine Georgia’s application to join the European Union: “EU member countries are very clear that if this law is adopted it will be a serious obstacle for Georgia in its European perspective”.

It's absolutely insane, yet sadly unsurprising. Just as we're seeing in Gaza, countries that make up the "rules-based order" now systematically put themselves in direct opposition to international law if it conflicts with their hegemonic designs, and won't hesitate to crush entire countries - or support genocide - for that purpose. We purportedly support "democracy" but insist that we dictate from abroad the internal politics of other countries as demonstrated by our extreme reaction against this law aimed to prevent foreign meddling.

We need to face reality: we - the West - are under the stranglehold of an extremely aggressive expansionist ideology that is in complete contradiction with the values we claim to support. And when a society has such dramatic internal contradictions, history tells us it doesn't exactly bode well for the future.theguardian.com/world/article/… It's even more hypocrite than this: the US has a very similar law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), that's essentially the same thing as this bill they call "Kremlin-inspired" when Georgia does it...

https://twitter.com/Irishgeezah/status/1790537363023675606?t=fz_77SKX4l8iwyR4WRGxXg&s=19

This is fascinating:

An Irish professor of international law - Anthony Carty - has spent considerable time looking through British and French archives, spanning from the 1880s until the late 1970s, to look at the historical understanding of sovereignty of the Spratly Islands. These are the islands in the South China Sea at the core of the present dispute between China and the Philippines.

He discovered that "the archives demonstrate, taken as a whole, that it is the view of the British and French legal experts that as a matter of the international law territory the Xisha Islands [the Paracel Islands] and the Nansha Islands [the Spratly Islands] are Chinese territory".

For instance on the Spratly islands he says: "French legal advice was that France never completed an effective occupation of the Spratlys, and they abandoned them completely in 1956. In the 1930s they recognized that these Spratlys had always been home to Chinese fisherman from Hainan Island and Guangdong. There had never been any Vietnamese or Philippine connection and French interference had only been in its own name and not that of Vietnam. It is the British who then drew a decisive conclusion, from all the French and British records available, that the Chinese were the owners of the Spratlys [the Nansha Islands], a legal position certified as part of British Cabinet records in 1974."

Fascinatingly, and immensely relevant to today's dispute between the Philippines and China, and America's involvement in the matter, he discovered "a record in the mid-1950s in the US National Archive, in which a US under secretary of state says that, while the Filipinos have no claim to the Spratlys, it is in the US interest to encourage them to make a claim anyway to keep Communist China out of the area".

His conclusion: "There is absolutely no doubt that this whole dispute is entirely about the Americans trying to make life difficult for the Chinese. The aggression that is building up against China and the scapegoating of China by the whole of the so-called democratic community of the world is appalling."globaltimes.cn/page/202404/13… Also, important reminder that the Americans told the Philippines at its independence in 1946 (the Philippines were an American colony) that the Spratlys were not Philippine territory, because the Spratlys were not part of the Philippines per the 1898 treaty Spain signed with America (in which Spain ceded the Philippines to America).

Just a couple of days ago I was warning about how the acceptance of Israel's bombing of Iran's consulate was destroying centuries-old norms around the sanctity of diplomatic facilities and... here you are 🤷‍♂️

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1776493338558087655

That was my argument 👇

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1775424137491837335?t=YHJUo4mKO46CWe5YDzImow&s=19

That's quite dishonest framing by AP, given that Russia, China (and Algeria) vetoed the US resolution for the very reason that it did NOT call for an immediate ceasefire.

Instead it merely asked to *recognize the importance* of a ceasefire, and to support American negotiation efforts towards that purpose. Which wouldn't have changed the situation on the ground one iota... That's the text of the resolution:

"(The Security Council) Determines the imperative of an immediate and sustained ceasefire to protect civilians on all sides, allow for the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance, and alleviate humanitarian suffering, and towards that end unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages;"

As the US Think Tank Responsible Statecraft rightly writes ():

"The clause does not demand a ceasefire but determines that it is imperative. Its support is not directly for the ceasefire but for the negotiation process the U.S. has been co-leading and whose parameters the U.S. has sought to determine in favor of Israel. The text points out that this effort to secure a ceasefire is 'in connection with the release of all remaining hostages.' This is an Israeli demand that is not likely to be accepted by Hamas in return for a time-limited ceasefire rather than a permanent one. As such, the American draft endorses the Israeli position in the negotiations and indirectly conditions the ceasefire on the release of all hostages, effectively making two million civilian Gazans hostages as well."

The US systematically vetoed all resolutions that were *actually* demanding an immediate ceasefire, so it's pretty clear they don't want one. This was a way to make it look like they were asking for one for PR purposes and for headlines from dishonest journalists such as AP's.responsiblestatecraft.org/us-ceasefire-g… Yup that's a good one. A ransom note indeed.

https://twitter.com/frogsarelovely/status/1771366718058664082?t=t-KbxsRTzGWcsIAkF1_CCQ&s=19

ROC (Taiwan) coastguards killed two mainland fishermen, which I believe are the first such casualties in the Taiwan strait in many years, if not decades.


They died off the coast of the Kinmen archipelago, which belongs to the ROC but which itself is just a couple of miles away from the Chinese mainland. Kinmen was in the news recently as Taiwanese media reported the US had dispatched special forces on the archipelago on a permanent basis (), which is extraordinarily provocative.

So far PRC authorities have been extremely restrained in their response, just condemning the "malignant incident" and asking for an immediate investigation by the ROC. Which goes to show that China is NOT looking for a confrontation in the Taiwan strait, as this is the type of incident that could be a casus belli.

Just imagine for a minute the worldwide outcry if those fishermen had been from the ROC, and killed by the PRC... We just wouldn't hear the end of it.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb…
newsweek.com/american-speci… This 👇 is also an interesting coincidence, just as these fishermen were being killed...
scmp.com/news/china/dip…

This is quite something! This is John Lander - Australia's former ambassador to Iran and Deputy Ambassador to China - explaining what the "rules-based order" actually is.

In his words it's "a set of ever varying, constantly vacillating rules devised by the United States for the benefit of the United States and its Western allies." He points out that "one of the most difficult thing about the rules-based order is finding out what the rules are!"

Link to the whole interview at the end of the thread. On this topic I've been making the point since the beginning of Israel's war on Gaza that if one takes a step back, it's really at heart a war of the "rules-based order" against international law 👇. And I really believe that's a key prism to view the war.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1751802441702760548?s=20

This is a absolutely fantastic example of data manipulation. Credit to @nikstankovic_ for spotting it (you can see his reply to @AgatheDemarais's post).

Not surprising coming from The Economist but the manipulation is still quite insane once you understand it.

Let me explain 🧵

https://twitter.com/AgatheDemarais/status/1752240231447748915

So what you understand from The Economist's graph is exactly what @AgatheDemarais understood: "oh my god, Japan has been 'derisking' from China for years, their economic reliance on China is low, Germany is so behind!".

Right? Well, it's TOTALLY wrong.

This is one of the best talks I've heard in a while on China's economy, by Eric Li, a famous Chinese VC and political scientist.


I summarize the main points in a short 🧵 First of all, he argues there was a fundamental misunderstanding of China by the US. The US convinced itself China would stay in the "peripheral" forever 👇 whilst China's objective was always to move up and be part of the "core".

"Democratic" Europe... where if you express a legitimate dissenting opinion as a country - and the interests of your citizens - a revengeful EU commission will cause your economic collapse.

https://twitter.com/FT/status/1751855979665268770

Yup, not their first rodeo

https://x.com/RReidFU/status/1751880602494918991?s=20

This is huge:

Top Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth confirms Israel used the "Hannibal directive" on Oct 7th, which calls to kill Israeli hostages along with their captors.

This is the exact quote from the paper:

"At midnight on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The order was to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is despite the fear that some of them have hostages.

It is estimated that about a thousand terrorists and infiltrators were killed in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. It is not clear at this time how many of the hostages were killed due to the activation of this command. In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed."ynet.co.il/news/article/y… Not sure if you remember these photos of burned vehicles reported by all the media as "destroyed by Hamas" (here Reuters 👇)? Well the Yedioth Ahronoth investigation now confirms they were in fact destroyed by the IDF...

That's a pretty stunning illustration of the double standards at play when the US criticize China's 9-dash line, having effectively transformed the entire Pacific ocean into "the American lake". Credit to @Bevin83994661

https://twitter.com/Bevin83994661/status/1742583546513154049?t=d5Xwp_vfN6X7XoN4jScgdQ&s=19

Quite a crazy story in Australia:

Prominent journalist @antoinette_news was fired by the country's main public broadcaster ABC after she wrote an article alleging that a controversial video shared by the Australian Jewish Association of antisemitic chants during a pro-Palestinian protest had likely been doctored (her article in next tweet).

What's happening to journalists around this conflict is absolutely astonishing. When they're not outright killed in Gaza (more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the war than have ever been killed in any single country over an entire year: ), they're getting cancelled left and right all over the West if they produce inconvenient reporting... Showing once more that "freedom of the press" is a principle that's easy to brandish when it produces narratives that are in your interests but quite rapidly dies down when it doesn't...canberratimes.com.au/story/8467384/…
cpj.org/2023/12/israel… That's the story she apparently got fired for

https://x.com/antoinette_news/status/1734744311408017682?s=20

It's interviews like this that demonstrate how Israel is a weapon of mass destruction of the West, and of the morally superior image it tried to portray:

This is UK Minister of State Lee Rowley responding to the fact that an IDF sniper killed a Christian mother and her daughter IN A CHURCH in Gaza. An act the Pope himself called "terrorism" and that Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the most senior Catholic cleric in England, characterized as a “cold–blooded killing”.

Minister Rowley's response? This is Israel "trying to defend itself" and the "only way to end the situation in Gaza is Hamas laying down their weapons and stop using their population as human shields".

In other words to him this isn't even the IDF's responsibility, murdering women and their daughters in churches is just par for the course until the other side surrenders...

Which is something you could maybe imagine the most evil terrorist organizations saying - "we'll murder your wifes and daughters in your places of worship until you surrender, your deaths are on you!" - but now we have UK ministers essentially saying this stuff, which is absolutely insane!

Does this reflect something that was always there, only hidden under a veneer of pretense morality? Or is it the product of a more recent degradation of morality in the West? At the end of the day it doesn't matter, fact is I can't see how there's any recovery possible from this for a long, long time. The whole world sees this kind of talk which is pervasive among almost all Western leaders. And they just won't forget, we're looking at a future where any talk of "values", "principles", "respect of rules", etc. by the West will be met by laughter and ridicule by the rest of the world for decades to come.

https://twitter.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1737013041676345532/video/1

This is what he is asked to react about 👇

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1736409380889952385?s=20

This might be the best explanation I heard for "why Oct 7" and, surprisingly, it comes from Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret service, and commander-in-chief of the Navy.

Here what he says (this is the first video, there are a couple more below which you'll really want to watch):

He says the "most important cause [of Oct 7]" was "the political paradigm", whereby Israel's policy was "divide and rule", meaning Israel "had to make sure Palestinians would not have a unified leadership" and could therefore always say "nobody to talk with, nothing to talk about". Concretely "in order to do it [Israel] had to make sure Hamas would go on controlling Gaza and the Palestinian authority the West bank", and incite them to "fight each other". This is why Israel "enhanced and assisted Hamas, transferred money, etc."

As a result of all this Hamas "got the Palestinians' support" because "they became the only administration who fought against the Israeli occupation and for the purpose of Palestinian freedom" while Fatah and the Palestinian authority became perceived as "Israeli collaborators". In his assessment "between 70 to 80% of the Palestinians are supporting Hamas, only because Hamas is perceived as the one who fight for [their] freedom."

He says Israel completely misunderstood the situation before Oct 7 because it measures "hardware" whilst Hamas measures "software", meaning that after every fight between Israel and the Palestinians, success for Israel is measured in "losses in human life, in military installations, in military infrastructure" whereas what Hamas measures is "the support of the people." As an illustration he says that in May 2021 - when there was fighting during 2 weeks and around 300 Palestinians were killed (to 17 on the Israeli side) - Israel thought that Hamas "suffered a huge loss and a huge military defeat" but from Hamas's standpoint it was "a huge victory" because this led to Hamas, for the first time, getting "more than 50% of the support from the Palestinian people." He says another key cause was "the new Middle-East [plan] presented by Biden" because "Palestinians were not mentioned".

To him this was a major mistake because "the Palestinians see themselves as a people, a nation" and this made them "feel alone and abandoned". As a result the Palestinians "chose the Samson option" because "they felt that they had nothing to lose and this was the only way for them to show to the world 'you will not be able to create stability in this region if you will bypass Palestinians.'" He concludes: "the tragedy is that they succeeded".

My favorite Kissinger video was when he introduced his wife to Mao, who got his mind absolutely blown by the height difference 😅 Kissinger was immensely impressed with Mao, as he later wrote: "There were no trappings that could account for the sense of power Mao conveyed. Mao emanated vibrations of strength and power and will. In his presence even Chou [Zhou Enlai] seemed a secondary figure."