Acquiring Sentience
Joined June 2019
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Turing Complete retweeted
They’re so doomed!
Their currency keeps rising against usd and their 10-year yield is 1.66%, they are importing more gold than ever before and on track to import 1700 tonnes this year
They are cooked!
Turing Complete retweeted
One innocuous post, followed by a string of not-so-innocuous posts to ragebait. 200 comments, almost all civil, a few rude or dismissive ones from Whites and Asians, but you only post the Asian ones.
Your Twitter and duplicity grindset far outclass Asians, so why be so modest😉
Ok, here’s a story about the Great Asian Grindset Debate.
A couple years ago we put our kid in a piano school run by a Korean woman living in France.
There’s a recital at the end of the year where all of the kids play; half Asian, which is very unusual for France, half White.
The Asian kids were all excellent. They were all an 8 or a 9.
The White kids were all over the place. There were 1s. There were 2s. There were 3s. There were also 10s.
The Asian kids all played, sorry but it’s true, somewhat robotically (which is no shame for a kid!).
The best White kids played with that extra dimension of soul and emotion that made them touch greatness.
The Asian kids were *all* 8 or 9. The White kids were all over the place from 1 to 10.
At the end the lady who runs the school gave a little speech, which was full of nice things, but had as a big throughline chiding the parents of the White kids for not making their kids practice more. At the end, she made a joke: "Remember, make your kids work, because no matter how hard they work, there’s an Asian kid next door who’s working twice as hard." We all laughed, myself included.
Do I think that the culture that produced those 8-9 kids is healthy, or one that I would like to see dominant in my country? Hell no.
Do I also wish that the White kids who were below an 8 had worked, say, at least 10% harder? Some 50% harder? Hell yes.
Turing Complete retweeted
It’s hardly a conspiracy theory. American foreign policy is undoubtedly « Grand Chessboard-brained » and combined with what British historian Denis Brogan called « the illusion of American Omnipotence » it has undoubtedly sharpened and hastened America’s loss of primacy.
America, had it been moderate and treated its primacy like the wasting asset like it is, could have ruled like the Zhou kings. Long after its vassal states became more powerful, customs and rituals…call it the international institutions of its day…bound the sinosphere.
« But Angelica! Eventually it stopped working and the warring states happened! »
In the long run we are all dead, Buttercup! The Zhou dynasty lasted around 800 years. Let’s say the last 250 was warring states. 550 years is still twice the lifespan of the the average Chinese dynasty.
Had America been more prudent, none of us here reading this would have lived to see the end of its primacy. Alas, it’s like all those emperors that killed themselves taking mercury pills in pursuit of immortality.
Turing Complete retweeted
我一学妹在北大读书，她说王虹回校做讲座时她就在现场，网上对王虹的评价完全是误读。
大家都在跟风吹捧她天赋异禀、靠智商碾压全场，但真正听过她分享的北大学子，都被她真实的一面圈粉了。
现场的王虹谈吐谦和、逻辑清晰，从不吹嘘什么天赋，反而反复提起“转专业那段日子有多狼狈”。头两个月她的作业全是红叉，班里同学都是竞赛金牌选手，就她一个半路出家。
要是她真信了网上那些“天才少女”的鬼话，今天就不会站在讲台上自揭伤疤了。可世上偏偏有这么多人，隔着屏幕就爱给人封神，好像不把人塑造成一个自带光环的怪物，就显不出自己眼光毒辣。
王虹干了件特别狠的事，她没飘，反而蹲下来，把脚踝上那圈最深的伤疤亮给大家看。转专业头两个月，她说“每天去教室都像上刑”。
别人随手就能解出的题，她得抱着书啃到凌晨两点，交上去的作业本依然红叉连成片。班里那些保送进来的同学，嘴里蹦出来的专业术语她听都没听过，想插话都找不到机会。
她说有回实在熬不住了，躲在教学楼顶层的厕所里大哭，哭完用冷水洗把脸，出来接着去图书馆占座。
这事儿她不说谁知道？
她讲这些时，台下几百号人安静得连翻书声都听得见。没有煽情的音乐，没有刻意的金句，只是平铺直叙，却比任何演讲都戳心。
北大的学生什么大人物没见过？
他们服的不是王虹后来拿了多少奖，而是她把自己掰开了晾在台面上说：看吧，我当初比你们大多数人都笨，作业全是红叉，课听不懂，甚至动过退学的念头。
有趣的是，王虹讲完这些，全场自发鼓了三次掌：
第一次是因为她提到第一次作业及格，把那张卷子存到了现在；
第二次是她提到当年嘲笑过她的同学，后来主动找她组队；
第三次是她最后那句：“别信什么天才，信那个在红叉堆里不肯抬头的自己。”
这三次掌声，狠狠打了网上那些“开挂论”的脸。
她没否认自己后来学得快，但她说那根本不是天赋，是前两个月憋的那口气找到了出口。就像一个人差点溺水，突然摸到了岸沿，往上爬的劲儿能小吗？
我学妹说听完讲座半夜都睡不着，脑子里一直转着那句“作业全是大红叉”。
她觉得特解气，原来那些闪闪发光的人，脚下也踩过一地碎玻璃。
她说王虹当时最后留给学生们的一句话让她至今难忘：“你们现在看到的我，是那个没被红叉打趴下的我。那个被打趴下过很多次的我，才是真正的我。”
Turing Complete retweeted
Very smart move on the Persian part. They should have built a statue to commemorate this ploy.
Iran was the commercial middleman. And if Rome and China make contact, and whether friendly or hostile, Iran would be in a tough spot.
Turing Complete retweeted
He did his PhD at CMU between 2015 and 2019 which overlaps with the period of the FBI's "China initiative" that treated every Chinese ethnic researcher in the US as a potential threat (and drove several to suicide).
Yeah, I wonder why he didn't stay in America...
Incidentally the Trump administration is doing even worse: the National Science Foundation just announced they're banning almost all collaborations with Chinese scientists (science.org/content/article/…). Guess what that's going to do to people like Yang Zhilin when they're told "you can't have any links with your fellow countrymen"?
Turing Complete retweeted
And despite it all, China became the world’s richest and most powerful civilization for much of the last 4,000 years—long before the United States even existed. Imagine that.
As a sidebar, many have no idea how astonishingly myopic narratives like this sound to many Chinese—and, frankly, to many non-Western observers as well.
There is a peculiar misplaced confidence in assuming that one of history’s oldest and most enduring civilizations wants outsiders to explain how it ought to organize itself.
The Owl View 🦉: One of the first rules of understanding civilizations is to avoid assuming that 250 years of experience automatically trumps 4,000.
Everything China owes in 21st century is because of Americans. We first destroyed Japanese imperial army that ruled over you. We freed you ungrateful Chinese.
Then we taught you capitalism that Deng Xiapeng embraced, then we taught you how to build smartphones, computers, electric vehicles, reusable rockets, transformer AI.
We gave you contracts to build those in your land with cheap labor. You learnt from US.
Yes the two party system did this to you. And we have the means to destroy your cities and your nation if you become arrogant in the end of the world.
Turing Complete retweeted
What's notable here is not the article's hawkishness (that's more or less to be expected from Hudson on China) but how little regard it seems to have for the intelligence of its readers.
If China is America's most important strategic competitor, then Americans deserve the strongest possible arguments from those who claim to study it. This is not that. This is a self-congratulatory fairy tale in which America creates modern China, introduces the "revolutionary" idea of benevolent government, and is ungratefully repaid with hostility. The empirical portion is poorly supported and meandering, but that's almost irrelevant. The article isn't trying to persuade a skeptical reader. It's written for people who already agree, and who want their feelings swaddled in a cozy historical fable.
There's nothing in that piece intended to improve strategic thinking on China. It's just a simple story for people who prefer to be reassured than informed, treating the audience as too dull to consume anything other than tidy narratives about their own inherited virtue. Its only purpose is to reinforce moral certitude.
Depressing that Hudson clearly thinks so little of their audience to expect they'll go for this slop. Even more depressing that they may be right.
For the past two centuries, America shaped modern China through education, science, medicine, commerce, diplomacy, and the example of constitutional government.
America's greatest export to China was the revolutionary idea that governments exist to serve the people rather than rule them.
Today, the CCP regards the United States not merely as a geopolitical rival but as its greatest ideological enemy, @milesyu10 writes.
hudson.org/foreign-policy/cc…
Turing Complete retweeted
If anyone ever accuses you of working for the seeseepee, just show them this tweet 😂
Turing Complete retweeted
We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.
- Georgi Arbatov, Soviet diplomat, 1991.
⏬️
Arbatov predicted that if the Soviet Union collapsed the United States would face a profound identity crisis.
For nearly half a century, the US completely organized it policies and internal national identity around opposing the Soviets. So much that it knew nothing else.
Without a existential adversary to unite against? It would be harder for the U.S. government its own domestic politics unified.
Since people might turn on each other without a common external threat. Or turn outwards to justify their military spending.
He was right.
Turing Complete retweeted
More important is UK imparting its wisdom and values on the RoW, including China. So China can steal the tech, idea, and determination from the UK. It may have 'succeeded,' but at what cost? UK will retain the moral high ground and intent to build, long after China has collapsed.
Turing Complete retweeted
Western *universalism* and Chinese *ancestralism*. Both are derived from cultural substrates of Christianity and Confucianism/ancestors. An ancestralizing China finds evangelism peculiar, more internally focused, expect other countries to be rooted in their traditions as well.
Turing Complete retweeted
THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICA’S ORIGINAL CHINA HANDS
It didn’t always used to be that America’s understanding of what’s going on in China was potato quality. During WWII there was an exception crop of diplomats who were actually born in China to missionary parents. They grew up not just in-country but in the back country. In the case of John Paton Davies Jr., he was born in Sichuan and learned to speak the local dialect first before he even spoke English.
When Davis returned to China as a foreign service officer, he was able to perceive what was going on with exceptional clarity. Like other China hands of similar backgrounds, he warned Washington that their chosen ally Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt, incompetent and NGMI while the communists were organized, disciplined and looked like winners. He also intuited that the space was there to peel the Chinese communists off from the Soviets, that nationalism was a more powerful animating force than communism. The US should keep its options open, exhorted the China hands, not tie itself to Chiang’s sinking ship.
Welllllll…the Chinese civil war went down pretty much as the China hands predicted. They weren’t vindicated, but immediately made into convenient scapegoats. “Who lost China?” was the primal howl, and the China hands caught the blame. It didn’t help that they advocated ditching Chiang and the KMT’s “China lobby” was formidable back in the days. Maybe not Israel level, but Israel-esque on their ability to be the tail that wags the American dog.
The China hands were accused of being disloyal communist sympathizers and purged systematically.
What a different fate to George Kennan, the Kremlinologist who became the architect of containment. But of course it was different…Keenan preached morally-correct containment while the Chinahands exhorted strategic flexibility. Keenan also had an aristocratic scholarly air. The China hands knew China, but it always a little too earthy. Like they’re at risk of going native. Too comfortable paling around in caves with communists or conversing in a backwoody patois with Sechuan farmers. They didn’t know how to elegantly perform distance from their subject, like Kennan did in the long telegram.
After being dragged thru the mud, the reputations of the original China hands were somewhat restored by Nixon/Kissinger and the success of the Sino-Soviet split. Their point of view was finally of use to Washington again. In fact, Kissinger was heavily reliant on their the reports they wrote before they were fired while preparing to his secret China trip.
It’s been 80 years since the heyday of the China hands and those who have replaced them are not of the same breed. Even the best China-watchers have a tendency to be blob-brained and seeing China only from the outside in. Chinese-Americans would be the natural cohort to replace the “mish kids” of yore, but they are often viewed with even more suspicion. It must be very hard to have Chinese heritage now in the USG and NOT be a China hawk. Even scientists in pretty neutral roles are getting caught up in McCarthy-esque investigations for suspected dual-loyalty.
The problem is never that America doesn’t have enough experts. But whether or not she’s in a mood to listen.
Turing Complete retweeted
And he also promoted this HK doctor/dissident/whistleblower woman, who he coached along w/ Bannon's team for a round of interviews, including w/ CBS if I recall correctly. Swallowed whole by the mainstream *respectable* outlets.
Turing Complete retweeted
This is a really important signal by China to Europe.
The social media account Yuyuantantian, operated by China’s state broadcaster CCTV and created in 2019 during China's first trade war with the US specifically to signal China's position, just wrote a long article (mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lO6LXYcY7…) on the brewing trade war between China and Europe.
Most notably they say the EU's current strategy of dealing with China "can only produce a paper tiger" (meaning it cannot hurt China) and that China is "not afraid" of a "freezing point" in trade and economic relations with the bloc - meaning presumably a complete halt of trade.
This sentence is eerily similar to what China told Trump when he unveiled the tariffs on China (and the whole world) in April 2025. At the time China's Ministry of Commerce said that "if the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end" (english.mofcom.gov.cn/News/P…).
The context is that the EU is currently working on a series of extremely hostile new legislation packages against China, such as the so-called "overcapacity instrument" on which I wrote a long post at the beginning of the month (see quoted post👇).
This instrument is basically a legal tool that says that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market.
In essence, it's a law that says: if your products are good enough that people want to buy them, that's grounds for banning them. Which is pretty insane!
There's also a so-called "diversification instrument" being developed alongside it, which - according to Maroš Šefčovič, the EU's trade chief himself - is modelled on how the EU reduced its reliance on Russian energy after the Ukraine invasion (scmp.com/news/china/diplomac…) and is developed with China in mind.
In their article, Yuyuantantian say that all of this is part of a "escalate first, de-escalate later" strategy - essentially bullying - that the EU borrowed from watching the US, but without any of the leverage to back it up.
As the article puts it: the actors who can pull off extreme pressure tactics can only do so if they have "absolute leading positions in key areas or irreplaceable international influence." The EU, it notes, has neither, hence them concluding that the EU "forcibly pursuing 'escalate first, de-escalate later' can only produce a paper tiger."
Another very consequential framing in the piece is that they characterize Europe as becoming - essentially - a rogue actor in the international system, that doesn't care about rules anymore. Which they say is suicidal for Europe in several ways.
First of all, as they write, the EU's international identity in the international system - its USP, if you will - rests entirely on being a "normative power," a rules-based institutional actor that you can do business with precisely because it won't move the goalposts on you. That's what made European standards worth complying with and European markets worth the entry cost.
As they explain, the EU had gone against China in the past but always within the rules of the WTO (with tools like anti-dumping and anti-subsidy), and always in a way that was somewhat justified and predictable, basically the cost of doing business.
However, the new approach is designed to be essentially unpredictable and arbitrary- and as such makes Europe less and less attractive and more and more risky.
They point out the irony of Europe on one hand saying it wants more investment and industrial cooperation to learn from China but at the same time "constantly raising the bar for attracting investment and maintaining industrial cooperation."
As they write: "the greater the uncertainty, the less likely long-term capital and supply chains will dare to enter, ultimately harming Europe's own sources of growth."
Secondly, the article exposes what is arguably the most self-destructive contradiction in the EU's entire approach: the EU's stated justification for all these new tools is its "unsustainable" trade deficit with China. But when China came to the negotiating table and said "fine, we'll buy more from you," the EU had nothing to offer - because what China wants to buy is high-tech products, and those are exactly what Europe restricts under its export controls policy (largely at the behest of the US).
In essence, Europe's approach is purely punitive, shutting every door simultaneously: you can't export to us (overcapacity), you can't invest here (unpredictable and arbitrary legal risk), and we won't sell you what you want to buy (export controls).
Now you understand why China is becoming frustrated to the point it's contemplating a "freezing point" in trade and economic relations with Europe. When the party on the other side of the table punishes you for exporting, blocks you from investing, and refuses to sell you what would fix the problem they're complaining about, there's not much left to talk about.
My personal opinion is that it is undeniable that Europe is suffering from grave economic problems, but it's mistaking symptoms for cause: it's doing the equivalent of wanting to punish the runner who overtook you instead of asking why you're getting overtaken.
The car industry is a really good case in point: Chinese EVs really are better than German cars at this stage, and it's NOT because of subsidies (quite the contrary in fact, see this: xitter.cf/RnaudBertrand/status/2…). As such, how does punishing China for their competitiveness help the German car industry, specifically? What would help are rather initiatives to learn from the best: stuff like technology partnerships and welcoming Chinese factories on European soil.
The notion that if you ban China the problem goes away is exactly what the Ming dynasty - in 17th century China - did and that's what directly led to the century of humiliation because it became backwards technologically: it's what we call in French the "policy of the ostrich" ("la politique de l'autruche"), putting your head in the sand and hoping that makes things better.
And timing-wise it couldn't possibly be worse: having cut itself off from Russian energy, caved to American tariffs, and destabilized its own industrial base - the logical next step was apparently to pick a trade war with your largest trading partner and the last remaining great power with genuine goodwill towards you.
Because that's the real tragedy of the China-Europe relationship: there is a genuine and frankly almost touching desire for engagement and cooperation from the Chinese side and Europe is doing everything in its power to squander it.
It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives.
These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become.
You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity.
Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on.
So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (euobserver.com/218003/china-…).
First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export.
By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity."
I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (europarl.europa.eu/RegData/e…), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity."
Utterly ridiculous.
And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity."
In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market.
Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become.
Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦♂️
Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": competition-policy.ec.europa…).
This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU.
It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve.
Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive.
The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition...
Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh!
What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree.
What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence.
No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening.
But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...
Turing Complete retweeted
Had an educational conversation with a farmer last week in the Shanghai suburbs. He approached me while I was relaxing next to one of the canals and asked me if I had ridden my bicycle there (I had). We then started chatting about agriculture in SH.
"Where are you from?"🧵
