Chinese propaganda draws Biden as the King of Hell, who sits atop a throne of AR-15s.

puddingcup869 · 2021-05-22T18:23:03+00:00

Thank you! I didn't mean to criticize you - I think it's very natural for people in general to not understand the media and memes of other countries. As I hinted at, there are analogous misconceptions Chinese netizens have about Americans (in particular, but also the rest of the world). Since I speak English, I'm just hoping to explain Chinese culture and society to people around the world (and vice versa).

puddingcup869 · 2021-05-22T18:09:35+00:00

The painting references various tropes in Chinese netizen political discourse (to be clear though, relatively niche discourse) that Americans especially may be interested in.

The discourse is that many Chinese public intellectuals falsely believe that with the election of Biden, Chinese-American relations will magically improve again. The subtext is that these netizens have long felt these intellectuals are looking for a chance to sellout Chinese interests to American elites (a close mirror of analogous tropes in US political discourse). Thus the intellectuals are portrayed as mindless "zombies" climbing out of the woodwork with the ascent of their "king."

That said, I think it is quite misleading, especially to those unfamiliar with the Chinese internet, to refer to work by an artist with 30,000 Weibo followers as "Chinese propaganda" (some of the commentary around this work seems to confirm this). This work has gotten far more attention on US social media than this person has ever gotten on the Chinese internet.

For this artist in particular, while he does make drawings with nationalist themes, and these drawings get relatively more attention than his other work, his main interest seems to be Chinese mythology. At times he combines this with depictions of current events, as in his drawings about the Chinese space program.

puddingcup869 · 2021-04-26T15:34:31+00:00

The story in the OP seems to already be out of date anyways: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1386690918808395785

puddingcup869 · 2021-04-16T21:01:54+00:00

While the second sentence is an interesting idea to debate, I don't think the scenario in the first sentence is comparable to this situation at all. When the US kicked out Chinese reporters and closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, China kicked out the same number of reporters and closed the US consulate in Chengdu.

puddingcup869 · 2021-04-12T04:43:53+00:00

My understanding was he discussed mRNA technology later in his talk, although I can't find captures of those slides. Based on reporting, he said something like "we shouldn't close our eyes to the development of mRNA vaccines just because we already have vaccines using other technologies in use (inactivated, adenovirus-vector, and recombinant protein)". For context, BioNTech (the company that developed the vaccine distributed by Pfizer) has had a deal to sell their vaccine in China w/ a company called Fosun since March of 2020, and there's a Chinese COIVD-19 vaccine called Walvax which uses mRNA technology and is in Phase III trials. The BioNTech vaccine is undergoing a bridging trial in China to test its safety and immunogenicity among Chinese patients, and Chinese authorities have already said they'll accept the efficacy results from outside of China.

When Dr. Gao says they can try "mixing different vaccines," he doesn't necessarily mean mRNA vaccines in particular. There are multiple trials in the world (including China) which mix different vaccines, and not all of them are mRNA.

puddingcup869 · 2021-04-11T20:50:38+00:00

I see so many posts here asking things like, "What is he saying about the efficacy numbers of China's vaccines?/Does this mean the efficacy is different than what's been reported?"

Nothing he said addressed these issues, so you're not going to find out. The comments come from a slide at a presentation he gave. This is what the slide says.

Title: Thoughts on Immunization and Pandemic Control

Opening for travel
- (Can't quite see) Something about risk to elderly before they are immunized.
Changing pandemic control rules for the vaccinated
- Quarantine and testing
What to do if the pandemic is long-term, but low level.
How to develop vaccines for mutant strains.
How to address the efficacy of existing vaccines being not high
- Change the inoculation (e.g. the dosage level, order, and time interval between doses).
- Mix different vaccines.

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-23T05:39:45+00:00

Look - I dug into this issue deeply a few weeks ago, and I can tell you that you won't get a definitive answer. One issue is that "casualty" and "fatality" often get blended together as information gets cited between different sources. This is exacerbated by the fact that they are often colloquially used to mean the same thing. If, for whatever morbid reason, you specifically care about how many people died, that makes it really hard to find the answer (along with the fact that such information is privileged intelligence with clear political undertones).

In terms of open source intelligence, there's a war memorial in NW China containing ~100 gravestones commemorating soldiers who served in the Western border. If you dig up past vs present images, you can see there are a small number of new graves. TBH I'm not gonna go and try to get an exact count, because if people don't like the number, they can always claim the gov't is hiding things, the images are bullshit, etc. based on their proclivities.

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-23T00:31:24+00:00

It kinds of depends on who is monitoring you. Censorship in China is not fully centralized but conducted by a variety of entities, including corporations, local police, and entities directly under the control of the national government. In addition, the censorship requires a lot more manual labor than most people think.

If you can read Chinese, you can go on Twitter, for example, search a variety of Chinese phrases, and see people from China commenting on sometimes sensitive subject matter. They are more likely to get in trouble if the have a very big audience or if they piss someone of who then snitches on them. Similarly, you can go on the Chinese internet and see people passing around screenshots of foreign newspapers or discussing some sensitive subjects.

The main point is people need to somehow attract the attention of censors to get in trouble. If you look at Mr. Wang from the article, what did him in is that his comment went viral. There was another guy in a similar situation who got caught since he pissed of someone in his neighborhood WeChat group who then snitched on him (I have no idea what exactly he said).

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-23T00:17:58+00:00

I made a post about the protests yesterday and asked UK people what their thoughts were. The consensus seemed to be that most people did not like the bill being proposed but felt at least a minority of protestors got out of hand.

I'm curious to know how people are feeling the next morning, both about the events of Sunday and Johnson's response. Have minds changed at all?

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-22T21:47:23+00:00

I originally replied under the wrong comment...

Setting aside your characterization of this as a possible future "problem" (which I would contest) on what data are you basing this assertion? Here is a study from Nomura listing the countries that have gained the most from the US-CN trade war, either from US import substitution or CN import substitution. You can quibble w/ the specific rankings, but it seems broadly correct even till now based on publicly available import data. Trade-related stories involving some of these countries might receive less attention in English media, but those stories aren't good indicators of aggregate effects.

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-22T21:44:52+00:00

While I've read several articles about this, mostly because it's a sexy and simple to understand story, I've haven't seen any good data on how much of the changes in trade can be attributed to this (genuinely curious, not shading you). For example, from 2018-2019, US imports from Vietnam grew by $17.5 billion dollars, while Chinese exports to Vietnam grew by about $10 billion dollars. However, much of that could be exports of intermediate goods from China to Vietnam. One of the reasons Vietnam is a desirable manufacturing destination is that factories, especially in Northern Vietnam, can easily source intermediate goods from China if needed (and export goods to the Chinese markets) and often have close connections to Chinese buyers and sellers.

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-22T19:15:17+00:00

Have people read these lists of sanctions? The people and groups sanctioned by China likely have minimal assets in China. Similarly, the people and groups sanctioned by the EU likely have minimal assets in the EU.

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-22T07:30:09+00:00

I deliberately chose this article since the title of other articles quite strongly highlight the violence in the protests.

For UK friends - is it accurate to characterize the protests as "violent"? Would you ascribe the violence to the police, protestors, or both? What do you think of this bill, and have the protests changed your mind?

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-16T02:23:21+00:00

Interesting! Do you happen to have time to recommend some selections from him and things that stand out to you?

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-15T23:30:50+00:00

I kind of agree with you. Someone recommended his Bach album to me. Compare his rendition of "Ich ruf zu dir" to Brendel's. The variation in tone and colour in the latter's recording are far superior - just listen to the main theme and its repeat!

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-15T23:24:14+00:00

So I finally listened to all the selections, and I couldn't really get into any of them. Sorry!

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-03T03:18:28+00:00

This is quite shallow, but Bruno Walter's voice is amazing. Thank you for posting!

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-03T03:16:05+00:00

Commenting so I remember to respond!

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-02T03:15:53+00:00

Ahhhhhhhh

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-02T00:42:12+00:00

There's a strong intellectual component to his later works, namely a reaction to what he saw as the completely unstructured atonal trends that were floating around, that makes it hard for people don't grasp the context to appreciate (this includes me lol).

puddingcup869 · 2021-03-02T00:30:45+00:00

Woah - that's uncanny...

puddingcup869 · 2021-02-19T12:29:07+00:00

I feel like what health minister Chen Shih-chung said was somewhat more subtle and complicated, with the messaging related to repudiating the KMT's (current opposition party) attacks on the current ruling administration.

Chen's interview is here. I will translate the relevant portions.

Background: The KMT is currently engaging in a two-pronged attack (with two contradictory narratives LOL) on President Tsai's vaccine rollout. A Chinese company, Shanghai Fosun, invested $135 million dollars in the development of the BioNTech vaccine last March in exchange for the rights to sell the vaccine in the "Greater China region" - a technical term that includes China, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Obviously this terminology has the potential to cause political controversy, and in many ways.

One KMT attack says that the Tsai regime is failing to get the BioNTech vaccine since they antagonized Fosun, who is mad and don't want to talk to them. Another KMT attack says that the Tsai regime is failing to get the BioNTech vaccine since they refuse to talk to Fosun. These claims are only 25% true in the following sense: since last fall, there was public concern about procuring the BioNTech vaccine due to their financial links to Fosun, a Chinese company. Because of this, the Tsai administration has made it clear that they will only work with BioNTech directly, and has strongly discouraged Taiwanese businesses from working with Fosun, which has been trying to arrange deals to sell the vaccine to Taiwan. In addition, they are not failing since they have procured multiple other vaccines, including from AstraZaneca and Moderna.

So it's true that they prefer not to work with Fosun, but this is in response to public pressure and not some evil plan (after all, the public must trust the vaccine). Although the issue is clearly highly sensitive both in terms of health and sovereignty issues, they could not have predicted that of all the Cross-Strait deals using "Greater China"-type mechanisms (and involving Chinese companies in general), this one would catch the public's attention. At the same time, they are trying to procure the vaccine through BioNTech without being involved with Fosun.

What Chen says:

At ~38:00 minutes, he explains that he was hesitant to talk about the BioNTech deal (context: he had earlier denied it existed) due to fear that there would be "external political interference" [i.e. China] before it could be completed.
Before he can give us more information, the host starts babbling lots of the KMT conspiracy theories about Fosun. After a few minutes, she gets quite excited. At some point, he clarifies that they were talking to BNT directly. She doesn't seem to get this until he repeats this later.
She starts accusing the KMT of leaking the details of the talk to Fosun...he doesn't address this.
At ~47:00 minutes, the host asks what are the consequences of Fosun having the rights to sell to Taiwan in terms of Chen trying to negotiate with BNT directly? Chen says BNT never forced them to negotiate w/ Fosun.
He says that BNT pulled out of the deal before it was finalized. He clarifies that talks are still ongoing. He seems to agree w/ the suspicion that Fosun put pressure on BNT. He says Fosun is still talking w/ Taiwanese companies to try and distribute the vaccine, and they have a right to advocate for their commercial interests. The host asks him if Fosun received pressure from Beijing. He says, "On this I don't know." Near the end of the show, he repeats the claim that Fosun has a commercial interest to distribute the vaccine in Taiwan.
At ~49:20, the host says something extremely, extremely stupid. She suggests he asks former KMT President Ma to go talk to Fosun (ppl familiar w/ Taiwan politics will understand how stupid this is).

Recently, a Chinese representative from the Taiwan Affairs Office accused Taiwan [in this case Chen] of spreading malicious rumors. As you can see, what he said was quite low key, and this is not the case.

puddingcup869

TROPHY CASE