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T. Greer Profile picture
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, and books I find interesting
21 subscribers
Oct 28 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I do not think China hawkery vs dovery is that well correlated with having lived in China.

I do think it is correlated with career inside China. Journalists who have lived in China are generally far more hawkish than academics who did, for example. It is not an accident that both Pottinger and Garnaut worked as China correspondents before they went into government. If you have never been to China but your area of policy expertise is climate, you are probably pretty dovish on China. If you have never been to China but your area of policy expertise is military affairs, you are probably hawkish on China.
Oct 25 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
The other problem with Angelica’s post is that she has the causality reversed: thr Taiwanese nationalist movement did not form because foreigners created a historical narrative to justify it—foreigners took cues from TW nationalists not the other way around! (This is also true for many bearish takes on China’s economy and politics: many ideas start with *Chinese* critics of the existing situation, get parlayed to their western friends in journalism/finance/think tank world, and then come to dominate the western debate about China).
Oct 24 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Again, I just don't have time for people convinced of Chinese weakness. "bro they don't have a culture of innovation over there" sure, fine, but do we install nuclear at $2.50/W? There are many bad things about China. So many. Could list them for days. Many sources of national weakness. Many real problems, problems that keep Xi up at night.

I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to portray China as some kind of wonderland.
Oct 24 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Speaking of potential chokepoints that America can squeeze: Semiconductor-grade quartz. Currently produced in one American mine only. Basic breakdown of the resource and its importance here: lesswrong.com/posts/rkhCvJzL…
Sep 27 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The obvious relevance for this re: that Hyundai plant who DHS raided—if we are playing a 10-20 year game we realize that allowing operations like that in are the first steps in creating an industrial ecosystem that will eventually employ mostly native born Americans. “Does this create the infrastructure and training pipelines that will build an industry of high-paying native jobs?” is not a bad way to to evaluate this sort of thing.
Sep 27 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Many have responded to this point in a very frustrating manner, arguing that reading with a dictionary “takes the fun out of it,” is unpleasant, etc.

Why should education be fun and pleasant ? Nobody says “the problem with memorizing times tables is that takes the fun out of math.” Nobody says learning verb conjugations is a pleasant part of learning French.
Sep 24 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Everybody cites this study on how 2/3rds of English majors cannot understand the first paragraph of Bleak House—I strongly recommend reading the study itself. It is very enlightening on why the students are failing. Image Original source:

muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
Sep 23 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I don't really think he has. rump's position is "the war must end, we cannot afford for the war to not end."

What has changed is Trump and his advisor's assessment of *how* to end it. When Trump came into office he, and many close to him, believed that American intransigence [1] was the main obstacle in the way of peace. Thus Trump's accommodative tone with the Russians.

This was not sufficient to create peace. So Trump is now pivoting towards a very different strategy for forcing an end to the war.

But the end is the same.
Sep 23 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
This essay--a dissection of the ongoing PLA purge--is one of the best pieces of a "Pekingology" I have ever read. Well argued, well written, complete command of the biographies of the Chinese elite married to a solid and clear eyed analytic framework. Image Next time somebody asks me "what does a good analyses of Chinese political fights look like?" I will send them this piece. Gold standard for how this should be done.
Sep 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is the thing about Chinese industrial policy: it is Darwinian in a way that most western attempts at industrial policy are not. There are two elements of this.

1) Chinese industrial policy is often run out of cities and smaller localities who are *competing against each other* for both market share and central government support.
Sep 17 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state" Image Source: apnews.com/article/chines…
Sep 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Bullshit. Charlie Kirk organized a 850 chapter, 300,000 man opposition machine & regularly broadcast to 7 million+ followers. The Biden government allowed him to do this. The Trump government allows the same to its opposition. The two regimes are not comparable. If Charlie Kirk was Chinese he would have been "invited for tea" back in 2013. He would never have been banned from Weibo with the other Big Vs in 2014. If he persisted in organized action he would have disappeared or placed under house arrest the minute he announced a campus
Sep 16 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
There are several reasons why Charlie Kirk’s assassination will not create the sort of culture change dynamic as the George Floyd death in 2020.

Attempting to do so will likely be self defeating. In politics the question is never “what is the right thing to do?” or “does this make me feel like I am doing justice.” Thr question is always “what can actually be accomplished and what will be the likely cost and consequences of accomplishing it?”
Sep 14 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
Before his murder, Charlie Kirk was two things: a power broker in the Trump coalition and a symbol of a specific vision for that coalition.

You will not understand why his murder feels so cataclysmic to so many if you do not first understand what Kirk symbolized. Image I have been thinking about Kirk and his appeal for several weeks now, actually. A producer from his show invited me to come on and talk to Kirk about China and Taiwan.

After I accepted this offer I began to binge his past shows, trying to prepare for the episode.
Sep 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I have no patience for this. I especially have no patience for the legions of anons who have accomplished nothing with their life claiming that Kirk accomplished nothing with his. Kirk showed us a path that works: building institutions with active mass membership, breaking bread and talking constantly with normal Americans, having courage to stand up for our ideas no matter how hostile the environment, and grounding politics in actual virtuous living.
Sep 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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").
Sep 1 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Aug 25 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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…
Aug 24 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Aug 22 • 45 tweets • 9 min read
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.
Aug 21 • 81 tweets • 13 min read
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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