China’s National Health Commission reports only 5,233 cumulative COVID-19 deaths so far. But China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs reports 4 MILLION more cremations from 2019Q4 to 2022Q3 than would have been expected using 2007Q4-2016Q3 cremations as a “normal” baseline. 1/4 Please discuss. How much of this surge in cremations is a function of excess mortality related to zero COVID enforcement? Is this evidence of the policy’s horrific human toll? Inability to receive medical treatment for other conditions. Suicide. Etc. 2/4

We should remember that Hu Jintao tried to fix some of the stuff Jiang Zemin broke. Hu eliminated agricultural taxes and most school tuition/fees, and introduced a number of rural social welfare programs. #2 This chapter I wrote for a book edited by @Dali_Yang contains results of a survey conducted in the same 23 villages in 2002 (the very end of the Jiang Zemin era) and 2010 (towards the end of the Hu Jintao era).

Before it became Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, I knew “gaslighting” was a good word for my book: Chapter 7, “How Judges Gaslight Domestic Violence Victims in Divorce Trials”
pbs.org/newshour/arts/… #2 “Profoundly at odds with the legal meaning of domestic violence and female abuse victims’ own understandings of what brought them to court were the revisionist, gaslighting narratives of their husbands, their family members, and judges.”

When I give talks on Zoom, I try to get a copy of the chat transcript to see reactions. Here are some examples from book talks I’ve given over the past year. #DomesticViolence
- “…This is so fucked up…”
- “what a joke” 也太搞笑了
- “my blood pressure has risen” 血压上来了
1/7 - “God, so sad” 天，好难过
- “So hopeless…it’s like this and you still can’t get divorced” 好绝望……这样还不让离婚嘛
- “Truly horrible, this is always the logic of denying divorce petitions” 真的太惨了，不判离婚的逻辑永远都是那一套
2/7

Big news: China’s divorce rate plummeted in 2021 to its lowest level in over a decade. The blue and red lines in this figure from a Ministry of Civil Affair report show crude divorce and marriage rates respectively. 1/9 My new book is about China’s ongoing judicial clampdown on divorce. China’s precipitously declining divorce rate shows that the clampdown on divorce has extended from courts to the Civil Affairs Administration. 2/9