ciainchina.bsky.social

Just when you think you’ve seen all the possible bad propaganda, this is what one Chinese embassy thought made a good ‘before and after’ comparison to show China’s progress. 😳

Sigh. My kid came home from school and said they’d watched a video about Taiwan today, with a military theme. Sounds like the healthy sort of programming that children should be watching in class. Not.

All the people you’d expect to be upset about the Nobel Peace Prize going to an opponent of Maduro in Venezuela are indeed in tears today.

An under-appreciated benefit of the USB port: it bypasses the need for a plug adaptor in foreign countries. 👍🏻

Sorry, but are we meant to think staged “Messianic leader surrounded by sycophants awkwardly feigning affection and trying to touch the hem of his garments” style propaganda is good? Is that the message here?

Retired Chinese people when the local coffee shop closes: Hmm, maybe I should have bought at least one drink over the years I used to sit inside it all day for free. (Not)

Attention is always on Uyghurs and Tibetans, but there are 55 minorities in 🇨🇳 and many of them are seeing language decline. I know a Zhuang woman who can’t speak Zhuang and recently met several Miao people who don’t know their language. Manchu is all but extinct. Why do these never get talked about?

A lot of people upset about the killing of Charlie Kirk are busy identifying co-conspirators based on nothing but furtive eye glances and baseball cap adjustments in the news footage. So their reaction to a murder is to help get other innocent people murdered in retaliation. Makes sense.

X is exactly how I expected it to be this morning, lol. Insults, squabbles, hypocrisy and conspiracy theories. Nothing changes.

Woke up to see that MAGA has found its Horst Wessel.

Why does everything have to involve everyone now? So a woman got mad at a guy because she didn’t get a baseball. In the old days that would have been between him and her. You don’t have to wade in.

This is your view through your sniper rifle. You get one shot before the other two are rushed to safety. Who’s your target? 😏

Not content with removing term limits, Xi is now pursuing immortality so he can rule forever. 😂 😱

Hard to reconcile China releasing thousands of doves in the name of peace with kids watching this at school and my kid coming home to tell me they did army drills and played rifle games at school today. Mixed messaging to say the least.

A new school year, but Xi Jinping Thought remains on the curriculum.

Just been to my friend’s dad’s compound in south Jiading. Christ. I hope he doesn’t pay a management fee because no maintenance is being done. 🐈 and 🐕 shit everywhere. Paint peeling. 🌳 overgrown. 🗑️ overflowing and stinking. Potholes in the road. Paving slabs missing. The other side of Shanghai.

Spoke to two other Miao people who also can’t speak their native language. One was a woman in her 40s, the other a young man in his early 20s who couldn’t even tell me how to say ‘hello’. “My parents didn’t teach me.” I asked “Don’t you learn it at school?”, knowing the answer ofc, and he said no.

In 2012 when foreign media was regularly reporting on China’s poor air quality, China used to get upset about the negativity. It even banned a documentary about smog in 2015 called ‘Under the Dome’. Now it wants you to remember so it can make a positive comparison. Interesting to observe the shift.

I feel like a lot of westerners don’t realize that a lot of western reporting on 🇨🇳 actually originates in 🇨🇳, esp about social phenomena. I see people say “CNN lies!” or “BBC propaganda!” about stories that are basically translations of viral Chinese news. Shows how little people read Chinese media.

I can’t think of a more cringe title than this play on ‘Seven Years in Tibet’, a film that remains banned in China. 🙈 Btw, I assume Andy learnt Tibetan and did all his pre-approved interviews in it, given it’s the official language there and he always insists reporters speak the local language?

An earthquake that caused a tsunami and now a volcanic eruption in Russia? Putin has clearly lost the Mandate of Heaven and needs to go.

Jason Smith—comfortably one of the dumbest laowai propagandists out there—suddenly discovers he hates censorship after all. Begs the question why he goes to bat for a government that pretty much pioneered internet clampdowns then.

Not unique to Andy, but I really loathe the popular idea that “respect is earned”. It implies one party is superior and the lesser party has to win them over. Respect is not earned, it’s given by default. We begin from a position of mutual respect. It can be lost thereafter, but we start as equals.

Continuing the tradition of all great hip-hop artists by, erm, happily complying with censorship demands from a government that’s not even his own. Stick it to ‘em, Xiangyu. You’re so brave. What’s next “Love the Police?”?

Is this diplomacy? 🤔

Am I the only one who finds it odd that major international news sites are giving headlines to this Coldplay/CEO cheating nonsense? Like … why? It’s not news. Its internet gossip that should have died within 24 hours. Is it just that it’s a story they can fill space with without needing journalists?

Two of the most hardcore Party faithful, who make pro-Party content for Party media, are apparently the “bravest” kids in media. Yeah, it takes so much courage to say exactly what you’ve been approved to say. Stick it to the man! 😂

Now that the UK plans to let 16-year olds vote, it’s going to be interesting to monitor TikTok for political content. That’s now a huge battleground. If there’s any truth to the fears about Beijing’s control over the app, China could now have big influence in UK elections.

This is actually an own goal, because why is the “central government” deciding how Uyghurs spell their own ethnonym? Surely that’s exactly the kind of low-stakes decision you can safely devolve to the supposedly “autonomous region” of Xinjiang?

youtube.com/watch?v=sRz5... 【匿名中国】I’m trying something new. Many China stories just don’t get told. Not because they aren’t worth hearing, but because people are afraid of speaking out. So, I’d like to try to offer a platform through which people can anonymously tell their China stories well.

Gave my seat to a lady with a newborn just now and realized it’s been ages since I’ve done that. It’s wholly anecdotal, but I do feel like I don’t see many new mothers on Shanghai Metro these days, which chimes with what we hear about the birth rate. Ten years ago I was constantly giving up my seat.

FM spokesperson reposting a 2017 video of Xi telling the clapping sea lions around him to just work hard for a better life. The part where he told the villagers to buy fewer takeaway coffees and eat less avocado on toast was cut off.