鍾翔宇 Xiangyu Profile picture
Anti-imperialist rapper and political commentator in the age of dying unipolarity and rising multipolarity. Host of @StraitTalkXY Inquiries: xy@xiangyu.tw
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Jun 29 16 tweets 3 min read
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. Image 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.
Jun 2 12 tweets 2 min read
🧵Why is the KMT more popular than the DPP among Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, especially on the east coast?Image 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.
May 25 13 tweets 3 min read
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.🧵 Image
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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.
May 24 6 tweets 1 min read
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. 🧵 Image 韜 tāo means to conceal
光 guāng means light
養 yǎng means nurture or cultivate
晦 huì means darkness or obscurity
May 19 11 tweets 2 min read
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.
May 15 9 tweets 2 min read
🧵Debunking the Myth That Marx Wanted to "Abolish the Family"Image 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.
May 9 8 tweets 2 min read
Desinicization of Taiwan's education meant removing content like this from textbooks 🧵 Image 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.
May 5 14 tweets 2 min read
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.
Apr 28 9 tweets 2 min read
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. Image
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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.
Apr 22 34 tweets 4 min read
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.
Apr 21 11 tweets 2 min read
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
Apr 20 16 tweets 3 min read
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.
Apr 8 14 tweets 3 min read
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.
Mar 20 29 tweets 4 min read
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:
Feb 17 31 tweets 5 min read
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. 🧵Image 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.
Feb 12 8 tweets 2 min read
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. Image
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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.
Feb 9 21 tweets 3 min read
Prior to the Vernacular Chinese Movement of the 20th century, spoken Chinese was not recorded in formal writing at all. Instead, ideas were "translated" into Literary Chinese (Classical Chinese), which is very different from how people actually spoke. 🧵 While Classical/Literary Chinese was not actually a spoken language, it had one great advantage: if you were a scholar, it did not matter what Chinese language you spoke, you could read this common written language.
Feb 8 19 tweets 4 min read
Juche, written as 주체 in Korean, is the Korean reading of 主體, which is read as zhuti in Standard Chinese (think how 1 is read as "one" in English and "uno" in Spanish, but mean the same thing). To understand Juche, you must understand Zhuti, a Chinese philosophical concept 🧵Image Let's break down the phrase 主體:

主 (zhu in Chinese, ju in Korean): main
體 (ti in Chinese, che in Korean): body

You can understand this as "the main body," or "the subject," or the "core entity."
Jan 25 19 tweets 4 min read
I call it Taiwan separatism and not "Taiwan independence," because the majority of those who support "Taiwan independence" view Taiwan's history through a pro-Japanese and pro-imperialist lens 🧵 Image Taiwan separatists use "decolonial" language to justify their positions. You would think they would therefore be anti-Japanese, right? But instead, many look fondly at Japan's colonization of Taiwan.

Below is a picture of Japanese invaders massacring a village in Taiwan: Image
Dec 22, 2024 23 tweets 6 min read
Recently, @GarlandNixon and @RealScottRitter had a discussion about the rapprochement between Trump and Kim Jong Un, but the way the facts were presented made it seem like the Koreans were forced by economic hardships to the negotiating table, ignoring other key factors. 🧵 Image In many people's minds, north Korea is nothing but a shithole. While the economic situation there is definitely not ideal for a number of reasons, including US sanctions, people don't seem to appreciate how much more powerful the country has gotten over the past decade.
May 26, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
1. Color revolutions work because those involved want to live the middle class American life they see on TV, but pretty soon this will all change. 2. As the US establishment fails an increasing number of people on delivering its social contract (work hard, and afford a house and family), we will see more homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, violent crime, and other symptoms of a failing society.