Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
T. Greer Profile picture
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, and books I find interesting
21 subscribers
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
Image
Image
Image
Aug 19 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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."
Aug 16 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I have a very different and somewhat romantic take on this question.

First though a map that shows you just how close to the border and far away from everything else Beijing was. Image One of the takeaways from this book’s section of the Ming Dyansty was just, for lack of a better term, how hard core the Ming officialdom could be. Image
Aug 16 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
NEW ESSAY: Did Taiwan "Lose Trump?" Image Two weeks ago Christian Whiton, who served in the first Trump admin State Department, published an essay for @DominoTheoryMag that went viral in Taiwan.

Its title: "How Taiwan Lost Trump." Image
Aug 2 • 54 tweets • 9 min read
I have asked this question on this platform several times over the last two years—usually not in reference to vibes but hard statistics, which support the idea that women have become the main (American) world travelers.

I am dissatisfied with the Twitterati answers.

Thread. Before I get into these answers a preliminary note. This topic makes many men defensive. It probably should. Decline in willingness to travel is a decline in appetite for adventure. I think that’s bad. We can do better.
Jul 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
IMHO they already know this -- moves over the last year can be seen as "lets try and wipe the slate clean while we still have the option; if we do not come up with a lasting reshaping of our security environment now, we will not be able to anything about it in a decades time." Or to put this another way: one major driver of conflict is the perception among one of the players that their position will diminish in the future. "We will never have more relative strength than we do, so we must act before the balance of forces is less favorable."
Jul 28 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
This is a really valuable piece.

A few of you might have remembered the rumors and reactions a month back arguing that Xi is losing his grip on power.

This piece lays out a framework for analyzing Xi's hold on power and then applies it to the current moment.

Few notes: The piece describes five fields of power within the PRC:

1) "The gun" (PLA)
2) "The knife" (domestic security services)
3) "The pen" (propaganda system)
4) "The paper" (Secretariat, CC Gen Office, CCDI, Org Dep)
5) "The blood" (the princeling families and social networks)
Jul 17 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
Several years ago I wrote an essay reviewing big synthetic histories of antebellum America published over the last few decades. One of my conclusions: “ One can follow the mood of America’s liberal intelligentsia decade by decade through these volumes. ” Image Three of the four were very good books. One —Daniel Walker Howe’s—ranks among my absolute favorite books. Image
Image
Image
Jul 17 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Been reading Reddit threads about Edward Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL.

It is full of folks who read excerpts/ a few chapters in a historiography class, now lecturing on how “outdated” it is, “historically inaccurate,” and “useful only for understanding the Enlightenment.” Bah! There is an astounding arrogance in these comments I find infuriating.
Jul 6 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
I was pondering the other day what would be required to make an English major as rigorous as possible (i.e. comparable to a hard science degree).

A few tentative thoughts.

1. The major in English should be first and foremost a major in English philology. Every student takes the basic linguistics core courses (phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax). A semester survey on English grammar caps that section off.

Every student takes 2 courses on old english, 1 on middle English, 1 one Early modern English, and then something on modern English varieties or modern English socio-linguistics.

You probably also want to include 3 years of Latin or French, or a passing test grade in either.

This is probably sufficient to give the student foundational knowledge in English *as a language.*

2. You would want a core set of courses that require technical mastery in interpreting texts. This means a poetry class that requires you to memorize poetic forms and scan hundreds of poems. It means memorizing and reciting poetry and other passages for credit. It means a prose class where people are taking big blocks of Faulkner or Conrad and diagramming the sentences and passages. It means diagramming famous essays and the structures of novels.

I am not sure how many courses this would require, but maybe two, one focused on prosody in poetry, the other on structure in prose.

3. Something like the following progression of foundational surveys:

a) Classical antecedents: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphosis. Even better if the class also assigns poems or short stories that allude to this material so that students can see the connections over time.
b) King James Bible. (Same thing as before--but perhaps even more critical to include the poems/short stories). Make students memorize key Bible passages.
c) Shakespeare survey. At least 8 plays across genres. Make students memorize key passages.
d) English poetry to Milton + Paradise Lost. Make students memorize.
e) English poetry after Milton survey. Make students memorize.
f) 18th and 19th century novels (assign 12, unless you have a really big novel like Moby Dick, in which case you can shorten a bit; at least half of the novels should have been written in English).
g) Development of the essay to 1900 (Start with Montaigne and Bacon and move forward in time. Include several book length works)
g) The modern essay and narrative nonfiction (include several book length works--Didion, Wolf, McPherson, that sort of thing).

There also should be at least one research based class, but I suppose they can choose can between different topics/authors there.

4. I would have previously said a series of courses on composition but given ChatGPT and the inevitability of cheating I do not really know if there is a point to this anymore. The curriculum would need to be focused on things that can be tested, things that can be recited, and class discussions and debates. Students will have to learn how to write well through reading good models.
Unfortunately, the inability to assign essays makes it difficult to reach out rigor goal but I do not have any good solutions to this. On a semester by semester basis this might look like:

SEMESTER I
-Linguistics: Intro to Linguistics and English Language
-Lit Survey: Classical Literature
-Eng Lang: Old English I
-GE credit
-GE Credit

SEMESTER II

-Linguistics: Phonology and Phoentics
-Eng Lang: Old English II
-Text Interpretation: Prosody and Form
-Lit Survey: King James Bible
-GE Credit

SEMESTER III
-Linguistics: Morphology
-Latin 101
-Eng Lang: Middle English
-Lit Survey: Poetry through Milton
-GE Credit

SEMESTER IV
-Linguistics: Syntax
-Latin 202
-Eng Lang: Early Modern English
-Lit Survey: Shakespeare
-GE Credit

SEMESTER V

-Latin 301
-Linguistics: Semantics
-Textual Interpretation: Prose and Structure
-Lit Survey: Development of the Essay
-Elective

Semester VI

-Latin 302
-Lit Survey: 17th and 19th Century Novel
-Lit Survey: English poetry after Milton
-Elective (research intensive)
-Elective

Semester VII

-Lit Survey: Narrative Nonfiction
-Eng Lang: Sociolinguistics/Modern dialects
-Elective
-Elective
-Elective

Semester VIII:

-Elective (x5)
Jul 4 • 38 tweets • 6 min read
So my basic theory for why this happened goes something like this: 1. There are intellectual reasons for the shift, but they were less important than the practical reasons.

The practical reason: a large portion of the western elite ended up with fairly good Latin right up to the 20th century, but did not have corresponding skill in Greek.