Few of us expected the DPRK to shut down it's borders to travel for close to six years now when COVID hit, but now there is finally a chance for regular people to visit the country despite the tourism shutdown.

How? Continue reading for more info 🧵 Here's a little recap of the situation. Yes, tourism is open to Russians. Yes, tourists did go to Rason in late February and early March, and other foreigners have gone in since. But with the exception of the few Rason tourists, everything else was a delegation, not tourism.

Lai Ching-te would make a great eunuch in an imperial court, an advisor to the emperor, doing what he does until the very end with great determination and stubbornness. But instead he's proven to be a very ineffective leader of not just Taiwan, but his party, the DPP 🧵 Because of his impatience, he decided to launch a "great recall campaign" (you're naive if you really believe it was truly "grassroots") to gain the majority in the opposition-dominated legislature. Instead of exploiting existing rifts in the opposition, he mended them.

WHY THE "NEWS" OF CHINA RECENTLY BANNING ONLYFANS IS FAKE!

Pornography is already illegal on the Chinese mainland, as is using the internet to transmit pornographic content.

Below are the relevant laws 🧵 1. Criminal Law of the PRC

Article 363: Criminalizes the production, duplication, publication, sale, or dissemination of pornographic materials for profit. Penalties range from imprisonment to life imprisonment for severe cases.

Chinese state media has failed at winning over the hearts of Taiwan compatriots, not because there's no talent, and definitely not due to some shortage of Taiwan compatriots willing to work with them, but because the incentive structure is utterly broken. 🧵 When making content intended for Taiwan audiences, rather than making content that genuinely appeals to the people here, most of the pressure is about pleasing higher-ups. It's a circle jerk that encourages performative loyalty, not sincere engagement.

Some updates from the ground in Taiwan 🧵

Political chaos, economic strain, and democratic backsliding are all accelerating, all with the @ChingteLai administration at the center of it. Here's what you need to know: If you've been following me, you'd know about the "Great Recall" that's going on right now. Basically, the DPP decided that it's an affront to democracy for an opposition-held legislature to vote against DPP policy. Their solution is to recall KMT legislators.

In the west, the story of Hitler is mostly framed around his nationalism and his views on Jews. We're told to hate him because he was a bigot, while the political economy of the Nazis is not mentioned.

Fascism isn't just bigotry + nationalism, but finance capital in crisis mode. Hitler wasn't some blind, hateful maniac, but rather a tool. Specifically, a last-ditch effort by finance capital to destroy the Soviet Union after the west failed to crush the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

Hence why Wall Street and western elites backed him early on.

🧵Why is the KMT more popular than the DPP among Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, especially on the east coast? The KMT has a long history of clientelist politics in Indigenous areas, dating back to martial law. Vote-buying—cash, rice, alcohol—was once common, especially in the east coast counties of Hualien and Taitung. Not exactly clean, but very tangible.

A lot of the loudest "anti-whiteness" rhetoric in the US isn't coming from the marginalized poor like we're supposed to believe, bur rather from elite liberals through their heavily assimilated minority tokens.🧵

Elite liberals who are more often than not Ivy-educated (with a bullshit degree), NGO-employed, media-savvy PMCs. Their tokens are minority children from upwardly mobile families, that have fully absorbed elite liberal norms — in speech, dress, values, and worldview.

The Chinese idiom popularized by Deng Xiaoping, 韜光養晦 (tāo guāng yǎng huì), is often translated as "hide your strength, bide your time." But while the spirit is captured by this translation, the poetic nuance is completely lost. 🧵 韜 tāo means to conceal
光 guāng means light
養 yǎng means nurture or cultivate
晦 huì means darkness or obscurity

Why do baizuo view the working class with disgust and worship the lumpenproletariat instead? Why do they call truckers "fascists" while defending drug dealers? Because the New Left turned "Marxism" into controlled opposition and we are still feeling the effects today🧵 Communists see the industrial proletariat as representatives of general labor and are thus the agent of revolution. But during the Cold War, the New Left emerged in the west—college-educated radicals who swapped factories for campuses and class struggle for culture war.

🧵Debunking the Myth That Marx Wanted to "Abolish the Family" Claim: "Marx wanted to abolish the family!"

Reality: Marx and Engels criticized the bourgeois (capitalist) family as an institution tied to property, inheritance, and women's oppression—NOT family bonds themselves!

Key distinction: Institutions vs. relationships.

Desinicization of Taiwan's education meant removing content like this from textbooks 🧵 Translation of the text:

I am Chinese,
I am rooted in China.
I love China,
Love it the deepest.
The language I love hearing most is our Chinese language.
The landscapes I love seeing most are our Chinese landscapes.
How warm Chinese families are— The elderly are the most respected.

In discussions about the 56 ethnic groups of China, you'll often see the term "民族" (minzu) translated as "ethnicity" in English, but the reality is that "nation" is the more accurate word. Here's why: In Chinese, "民族" refers to both cultural and political communities that share a common identity. These groups, though distinct in language, culture, and history, are recognized as nations within the larger Chinese framework.

Over 100,000 (estimates go up to 200,000) people came out on Saturday, April 26, to protest Lai Ching-te's governance. Funny how western MSM is silent and continues to present Lai as popular in the media.
He won the election with 40% of the vote (less than 30% if we count abstentions) and with the legislature in control of the opposition, made up of the two oppositional parties, the KMT and TPP.

Radlibbery didn’t come from below. It was imposed from above—by state policy, NGOs, and HR departments. The Obama era was the turning point. Here’s how "wokeness" became a tool of elite control, not grassroots liberation: 🧵 Under Obama, the US establishment embraced a new neoliberal multiculturalism

✅ Superficial diversity
❌ Economic justice

Wall Street got bailouts and drone wars expanded while identity-based reforms became the acceptable face of progress.

Conspiracy theories aren’t inherently left-wing or right-wing—they tend to emerge among people who question the establishment. And more often than not, those people come from the working class. Real conspiracies do happen, and conspiracy theories are simply unproven suspicions of such conspiracies. Some turn out to be true; others don’t.

In the 2000s, conspiracy theorists tended to be on the broad left in America as the right rallied behind Bush post-9/11

Why can non-Latinos successfully run taco spots, but almost no non-Chinese person runs American Chinese restaurants? After all, they're both similarly priced with similar mass appeal.

So let's look at the barriers 🧵👇 You’ll find tacos sold by people of all backgrounds: white-owned taco trucks, Korean fusion taquerias, even Michelin-starred spots run by non-Latinos.

But when’s the last time you saw a non-Chinese person run a Chinese takeout place? Not saying it never happens, but it's rare.

Zuoren is a Chinese concept whose meaning is lost no matter how you translate it. On the surface, the characters for zuoren 做人 literally mean "being a person," but to the average westerner who did not grow up around this concept, this explanation is meaningless. 🧵 The closest thing I can think of is "being a man," but that's more about bravery than it is about conducting oneself properly in general. Zuoren is more of a combination of knowing how to conduct yourself, be a good person, and behave with integrity, all while knowing your place.

The imperative for communists to win over small business owners—including truckers, farmers, artisans, & other "owner-operators"—stems from a materialist analysis of their class position and the strategic necessity of building broad working-class unity against monopoly capital🧵 Dismissing them as inherently reactionary risks alienating a segment of society that, while formally "petty bourgeois," is often materially proletarianized and shares overlapping interests with the working class. Here’s why this alliance is crucial:

The 228 Incident (February 28, 1947) is one of the most misunderstood events in Taiwan’s history. Many narratives—both pro- and anti-China—distort the facts, often for political purposes. Let’s break down what really happened. 🧵 The conventional story: A woman selling untaxed cigarettes was beaten by authorities on Feb 27, sparking protests. The KMT responded with mass killings, slaughtering tens of thousands of Taiwanese civilians.

Well well well, turns out one of the people detained by ICE due to recent policy shifts is none other than Johanne Liou, who was dubbed the "Sunflower Goddess" during the 2014 Sunflower Color Revolution. She was arrested in Boston.
She entered the US in 2019 on a tourism visa and never returned to Taiwan. She was arrested on charges of drug trafficking and scamming. While in the US, she was actively fundraising for the DPP under the pseudonym Jojo.