It's a shame that neither the academic publishers (Oxford, Cambridge, Yale) nor the big commercial ones (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins) regularly commission translations of Chinese academics' work. Today's most intellectually ambitious Chinese academics (I know of) are Lan Xiaohuan at Fudan and Shi Zhan at Foreign Affairs University.

In the past few years, both published highly original books on Chinese/global history and economics that sold millions of copies.

The UK is giving all recent grads of "the world's top 50 universities" a 2-3yr visa (all levels & fields).

If I'm reading the rules correctly, China's Tsinghua and Peking U grads are also eligible. Huge implications for global talent competition if true?

ein.org.uk/blog/what-you-… Under this "High Potential Individuals" scheme, visa holders don't need to come with a UK job offer, can work without employer sponsorship, can bring family, can switch to other visas leading to permanent residency.

Previously only UK grads or those w job offers have a path.

Qs about this PNAS paper on demographic projections for China:

The authors say that the future isn't grim bc once you adjust for 📈labor force participation and 📈productivity, the ratio of dependents to workers is largely unchanged from today's level.

pnas.org/content/118/40… Notation: ADR is the conventional dependency ratio (dependents / workers); LFDR and PWLFDR adjust for labor force participation and productivity (proxied by edu).

It seems like what's driving their difference is the assumption that female labor force participation📈as edu📈.

One of China's most prominent technocrats Huang Qifan gave a speech last month on the "five changes in China's development strategy between now and 2035."

The end goal is for China's GDP to exceed $30 trillion by 2035, adding 1.4b to the world's high-income population of 1.1b. Some highlights (from my vantage point):

ECONOMY

1.1 Self-sufficiency in energy, agriculture, and manufacturing

1.2 Greater openness to foreign investment; greater involvement in international orgs

1.3 Import/export's share of GDP down to 25%; disposable income💹 to 50%

Spotify publishes the coolest research!

Facts from this paper: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWS…

1) Everyone listens to music released in their adolescent years.

Also from nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opi… we know that the peak influence age for women is 13 and men 14. 2) Individuals across different states have the same level of diversity in music taste, but state-level diversity is quite different -- the measure doesn't correlate with the entropy of states' racial composition but does correlate strongly with the share of Hispanic population.

Trying to see if we can audit the Twitter cropping algorithm more rigorously... Here's the same person (Obama) with light and dark skin tones.

Photos taken from this paper: academic.oup.com/poq/article/80… Pair #2, same background, same pose

Photos from: uky.edu/AS/PoliSci/Pef…

The Chinese magazine Renwu just published a long feature on “algorithms and food delivery drivers”.

Apparently the delivery platforms ask drivers to follow ***walking*** rather than driving directions, so drivers have no choice but to go against the traffic, run red lights, etc. Drivers say it’s impossible to deliver “on time” if they follow traffic rules.

And as the algorithm gets trained on past delivery times, there’s a race to the bottom — the platform makes ever more unrealistic estimates, and drivers take on greater risk in order to stay in.

Exhibit A of social media as outrage merchants:

I share a lot of academic research on Chinese social media and frequently find that in the comment section, offensive one-liners get ranked higher than sincere discussions even though the former has fewer likes (see screenshot). Weibo’s comment section has a Reddit-like nested structure, and the ranking algorithm takes into account **all** likes garnered by the parent comment and its children.

You can imagine how this kind of algorithm amplifies resentment and distorts our perception of public opinion.

Interesting discussions going around the Chinese Internet re the power WeChat wields as a super app that rolls your work, social, financial life into one.

Apparently when you get suspended, it becomes logistically difficult to pay back the loans you took out on the platform. Toll payments in China are all made online these days.

One blogger said he missed several toll payments because his old WeChat account got suspended and the toll payment system wouldn’t accept a new WeChat account.

He worried that his financial creditworthiness may take a hit.

A while ago I was playing around with some Chinese names data and found that people preferred shorter (one-character) names before the 1990s but that the trend was quickly reversed in more recent years.

I didn't think much of the finding, because it seems easily explained by.. Greater openness of society/marketization leading to more expressions of individualism.

But a friend pointed me towards a Chinese economist's blog post looking at name lengths in Chinese dynasties. Turns out that Ming and Qing saw similar trends!

(Chart credit goes to Chen Qin)

On Chinese social media people are sharing photos of their moms from the 1990s.

I’m no fashion designer, but I hope historians digitize these photos!! More:

Why do some Chinese people pick weird English names?

In China, family names are concentrated (20% of the people are Wang/Li/Zhang), whereas given names are unique. The opposite is true in the U.S. and the U.K.

TLDR: Because Chinese people distinguish themselves by given names. You can see more "given name concentration" charts in my new blog post here: yiqinfu.github.io/posts/chinese-….

The idea is that "common given names" are a lot less common in China than in the U.S. or the U.K.

WeChat has long restricted the use of external links on its publishing platform, allowing one per article at the bottom of the page (no inline hyperlink).

Now Weibo says starting in August, it will only redirect URLs that link to an approved list of websites.

Both platforms... Justify the restrictions on anti-phishing grounds, but suppressing external links is also a classic anti-competitive move.

Driving users to content/e-commerce platforms not owned by Tencent/Alibaba is hard.

Responsible journalism, or just info sharing in general, is dead.

China's central bank just published results from its "most comprehensive urban household wealth survey to date."

Key findings:

The top 1% of urban households have, on average, 50 million CNY (or 7 million USD) in assets, accounting for 17% of total urban wealth. The report adds that if we assume all rural households have zero wealth, then the top 1% holds 22% of wealth in China, making the country "relatively more equal than the U.S.," where the top 1% holds 39% of wealth.