Axel Dessein

🇧🇪🇬🇧 / 中文通 / Alum: @warstudies @ugent

[Axel Dessein @AxelDessein]

#PhDone #VivaSurviva

With an everlasting thank you to my supervisors and viva committee!

https://t.co/CWBqOIqRNd

[Yanzhong Huang @YanzhongHuang]

China’s college entrance exam registrations fell another 450k to 12.9M — 2nd straight drop. Beyond demographics: exam repeaters retreating, vocational/job paths rising amid grad unemployment & education inflation. Meanwhile, civil service exam applicants hit new highs, now surpassing postgraduate entrance exams. Higher ed’s old monopoly is cracking; stable public jobs look much more attractive as opportunities narrow. Big shifts ahead. https://t.co/tLkGdiAxIS

[Weilin Xiao @xwl0822]

Excited to see our article, "Promoting Meritocracy through Recognition: The Post-recognition Career Trajectories of China’s Model County Party Secretaries", now published in First View at @chinaquarterly.
https://t.co/YUrN9BXWtx

[Dr Iain Overton @iainoverton]

This headline from the BBC - "Third of people say uni degree not worth it, as student loan inquiry begins" - really needs context. I mean, I am sure if you interviewed someone with £50,000 in debt who got a 3rd class degree in a course that isn't easily translatable into work and who did so from a University that might not immediately get your CV read, then perhaps they might feel it was not worth it, at least in terms of income earnings.

But - how was the question framed? Purely in terms of it being a benefit financially? Who was asked? Was it people with a wide array of degree results or was it led by people with axes to grind?

In an age with AI is already making many people uncritical and lacking increasing capacity to challenge systems of power, I worry that these throw away headlines will make many see universities as places of irrelevance, rather than places of profound learning and development and, in the end, radicalism.

https://t.co/cEyZ32K0JW

[Tobita Chow @tobitac]

Eli Friedman lays out the caveats in the hukou "opinion" document, the daunting obstacles to abolition, and how the Party's hostility to social movements prevents the emergence of the political force necessary to overcome those obstacles https://t.co/Rm0qSpA8hg

[Philip Bunn @PhilipDBunn]

So, why? Why would I bother producing a paper in this manner? Why would I send it to a journal? To what end, and for what purpose?

[John Reeks @wartsandbrawls]

“All that will be left outside of Oxbridge will be a scattering of AI-infested hubs for the accelerated production of hyper-indebted ‘graduates’.”

https://t.co/AIkn5nv7mF

[Shanliren @wlmphi]

This is a letter of appointment issued by Ming Dynasty emperor in 1603 to Nurhaci, the Manchu leader, as General of Dragon and Tiger, in recognition of his active performance in resisting Japanese in Korea. It is currently on display at the Shenyang Palace Museum.

[Jonathan Cheng @JChengWSJ]

A former doctoral student has shaken China’s academic establishment by accusing prominent scholars of fabricating data and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at several leading institutions and drawing attention from state media.
@YuxuanJia02
https://t.co/eQzktuIsEb

[Georgy Kantor @GeorgyKantor]

The conclusion to the great Stefan Collini's piece in the LRB on the British university crisis (the whole article very much worth reading). https://t.co/FQsZbkThiA

[FT Data @ftdata]

UK universities cut jobs, research and teaching amid squeeze in overseas students https://t.co/h5F8LCAjqv

[Sir Humphrey @pinstripedline]

An odd stance given that KCL London has a world leading War Studies department, and runs the academic side of the Staff College in Shrivenham.

[Ted @ted_huang]

“Taiwan is the Empire’s Taiwan, and at the same time, our Taiwanese people’s Taiwan”
臺灣は帝國の臺灣であると同時に、我等臺灣人の臺灣である

In 1920, Taiwanese activist 蔡培火 made this bold claim of identity in his essay “Our Island and Ourselves” 我島と我等

[Yuki賴 @k0ushou]

Vietnamese’s native equivalent of Chinese 萬歲 (“long live-10,000 years”) is muôn năm. muôn [muən˧˧] is itself an old reflex of 萬, whose Tang dynasty pronunciation was roughly /muanH/. Later, Vietnamese also adopted the reading vạn, so they ended up with two readings of 萬

[L-inglizi @Cantwara_]

The oldest known piece of poetry in the Dutch language was actually written in Rochester, a small town in Kent, in south-east England.

[Jean Christopher (Chris) Mittelstaedt @jcmittelstaedt]

New RAND research report: https://t.co/s8Gbx5OzpL

[Jean Christopher (Chris) Mittelstaedt @jcmittelstaedt]

"common prosperity remains vague. On the one hand, the Zhejiang province pilot will take years for decisive results on effective strategy to come out. On the other hand, taking into consideration of huge regional differences, it is unrealistic for a one-size-fits-all approach"

[Jean Christopher (Chris) Mittelstaedt @jcmittelstaedt]

1/ 🚨🚨 My new article in The China Quarterly arguing that Xi Thought is not a coherent doctrine. Rather, it is a rhizome - unity is an effect of distributed institutional labour, not a property of the texts themselves

[Jean Christopher (Chris) Mittelstaedt @jcmittelstaedt]

🚨 🚨 My new article in The China Journal (@TheChinaJournal): "Historical Nihilism: The Rise of a Political Technology." It traces how 历史虚无主义 went from a fuzzy polemical label into an institutionalized apparatus of epistemic control under Xi

https://t.co/LFNocVfCa0

1/

[Jean Christopher (Chris) Mittelstaedt @jcmittelstaedt]

With all the discourse on AI making the humanities obsolete, there are quite a few articles in the Chinese media arguing the opposite

E.g. this article argues that "the humanistic qualities embedded in the humanities remain a domain that artificial intelligence cannot reach"

[IPSA @ipsa_aisp]

The Political Psychology of Citizens in Rising China
https://t.co/xFSDwGj6oI