Lim Alex

Impermanence

[Lim Alex @LimAlex16]

@afshinrattansi He just reminded China: never depend on a supplier that can switch you off.
Sanctions, export controls & chip restrictions, the U.S. pushed China to build alternatives. Weaponizing trade often accelerates self-reliance.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

China is planning to spend around 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over the next five years to build data centers across the country

At least 80% of all AI chips must come from domestic suppliers, primarily Huawei.
Nvidia and AMD are locked out by design.

Nvidia once held a 95% market share in China's AI market.
Now? Zero.

America did not lose China’s AI chip market because China “closed its doors,” but because America chose to weaponize chips, sanctions, export controls, entity lists, national security hysteria, and technological apartheid against its own largest customer.

Washington took the world’s largest chip consumption market — a market that could have funded American semiconductor dominance for another generation — and taught it the most important lesson:

Never let your future depend on a supplier that can be turned off by one paranoid empire.

So China did what any serious civilization-state would do.

It localized.
It substituted.
It built its own stack.
It turned a customer relationship into a sovereignty project.

And the same people who tried to choke Huawei are watching Huawei become the backbone of China’s AI infrastructure.

This is a textbook own goal.

America thought it was denying​ China the future.
In reality, it compelled​ China to architect​ the future beyond​ America.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

The EU has mastered one trick:
When it wins, it calls it free trade.
When China wins, it calls it overdependence.

For decades, European cars, appliances, luxury goods, chemicals, machinery, and high-end consumer products entered the Chinese market. China did not cry that Europe was “distorting” its market or creating “dependency.”

China competed.
China learned.
China upgraded.

But the moment Chinese industries became competitive, Europe suddenly discovered “strategic risk.”

Solar panels?
Europe blocked and punished Chinese solar for years with tariffs and trade barriers. Did that revive Europe’s own solar industry? No. It only made Europe’s energy transition more expensive until it eventually had to reopen the door.

Huawei and ZTE?
Europe followed Washington’s pressure campaign, ripped out Chinese telecom infrastructure it had already deployed, spent more money, delayed its own networks, and called that “security.”

Energy?
Europe chose geopolitical obedience, cut itself off from cheap Russian energy, raised its own industrial costs, became more dependent on the U.S., and then watched its companies move across the Atlantic under American subsidies and tariffs.

But somehow the problem is still China.

Please.

Europe’s crisis was not created by Chinese overcapacity.
It was created by European complacency, American dependency, ideological industrial policy, expensive energy, and decades of mistaking moral lectures for competitiveness.

Now Chinese industries are faster, cheaper, more integrated, and more efficient — from EVs to batteries, solar, electronics, ports, logistics, and manufacturing ecosystems.

So Europe invents new language:
“Diversification.”
“De-risking.”
“Overdependence.”
“Fair competition.”

But strip away the diplomatic costume, and it is just protectionism with Brussels paperwork.

China did not force Europe to deindustrialize itself.
Europe made its choices.

It followed Washington.
It sanctioned its own energy base.
It taxed its own consumers.
It slowed its own innovation.
It lectured China while China built.

And now it wants China to pay for Europe’s failure to compete.

No.

China-EU trade is not a charity program for declining European industries.
If Europe wants competitiveness, it should build it.
Not rename protectionism as “diversification” and expect China to applaud.

[Lim Alex @LimAlex16]

@OopsGuess China sends ~8.8% of exports to the US; the US sends ~7.8% to China.
Significant, but neither is totally dependent on the other.
In short: significant, but not existential—for either side.

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

"It brings me no pleasure to compare what Israel is doing to what the Nazis did, but how can we not? When you have things like ghettos, starvation, concentration camps and planned systematic extermination of people"

Jewish journalist @kthalps

CC: LBC @lewis_goodall @hasanthehun

[Lim Alex @LimAlex16]

@afshinrattansi This is why the world’s sole hegemonic power—ruled by its military-industrial complex—along with its vassal states, is so deeply worried. They keep conjuring up all manner of lies about the Middle Kingdom: overcapacity, aggression, genocide, forced labor, and the like.

[Adriana Vitan Balint @adrianavbalint]

'Ucrainenii au încărcat și au direcționat drona pentru aruncarea în aer a terminalului de petrol, contînd și pe alăturatul depozit de azotat de amoniu. Asta ar fi ras instantaneu cu totul cam jumătate din Constanța și, mai ales, ar fi șters urmele, exploziile spulberînd orice firicel din drona controlată permanent de atacatorul ucrainean.

Dacă nimerea, drona era rusească - vorba unui amic pe care-l prețuiesc mult. Doar că drona s-a înfipt și s-a blocat în balizele antipoluare. N-a mai putut mișca.

În tot acest timp, operatorul ucrainean al dronei avea permanent control vizual satelitar, în timp real, prin camerele video ale sculei, perfect funcțională cu excepția agățării ei în balize. Operatorul a văzut astfel că niște unii s-au apropiat și că filmează drona de la nici 10 metri distanță. Deci obiectul delict era nu doar blocat, ci deconspirat și ușor atribuibil statului producător și utilizator cu mare succes. E plin internetul de povești eroice despre lovirea cu dînsele, în două rînduri, a Podului Crimeei, între altele.

Cînd ucrainenii au văzut,  în timp real, că românii filmează drona neatinsă au sunat la București înainte s-o detoneze controlat. Au sunat nu din dragoste aliată, ci pentru a distruge în siguranță electronica în care încărcaseră traseul și ținta prestabilite. Altfel s-ar fi dovedit cu probe pipăibile că au țintit cu premeditare ce au țintit.

Pierdea controlului dronei prin bruiaj rusesc - adică varianta oficializată inclusiv de la cel mai înalt nivel în România - e o harneală pentru vîrsta unui școlar neatent de clasa a patra. Las' că rușii s-a lins pe bot de Starlink-ul american cu antena la vedere pe drona filmată. "Pierderea controlului" e anulată de telefonul de la ucraineni care a anuntat detonarea dispozitivului pentru - repet - distrugerea probei.

Pe scurt: ne-a ferit Dumnezeu.
Ne-a ferit numai bunul Dumnezeu, cu niște balize antipoluare agățate de coada unei monstruozități cu care România - deci NATO - trebuia tîrîtă în război, nenorociților!!!"
Sorin Faur, jurnalist

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

A 32-year-old junior doctor in Australia walked into his hospital laboratory on a Tuesday morning in July 1984, picked up a small glass beaker containing one billion live bacteria suspended in beef broth, and drank it. He had told no one in advance. He had not asked his wife. He had not asked his ethics committee. He had not asked his hospital. He had a theory that the entire global medical establishment had been treating millions of patients incorrectly for almost a century, and he had run out of other ways to prove he was right.

Three days later his mother told him his breath smelled like a corpse. Five days later he started vomiting at six in the morning. Ten days later he was endoscoped and found to have severe inflammation across the entire lining of his stomach.

He had given himself the disease he was trying to cure, in order to prove that the cure was a single course of antibiotics.

It took the medical establishment another twenty-one years to admit he was right.

His name is Barry Marshall. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.

I read his actual 1985 paper last night and could not stop thinking about it.

The textbook story of medicine treats stomach ulcers as a story that has always been understood. You have an ulcer, you take a course of antibiotics, you are cured. That story is true. It is also missing the part where, until almost the end of the twentieth century, this disease was considered chronic, incurable, and almost entirely caused by stress, spicy food, and personality flaws. Hundreds of millions of patients suffered with ulcers for years and decades. Tens of thousands died from complications. The entire global pharmaceutical industry built a multi-billion-dollar business selling acid-suppressing drugs that managed the symptoms while never touching the cause.

The cause was a bacterium. The cure was cheap. And one man drank the bacteria himself to prove it.

Here is the story almost nobody tells you.

In 1979, a quiet pathologist named J. Robin Warren was working at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia. He was looking at biopsy slides under a microscope when he noticed something that should not have been there. Spiral-shaped bacteria, alive and active, sitting on the lining of a human stomach.

The medical world at the time was unanimous on this point. Nothing lives in the stomach. The stomach is filled with hydrochloric acid strong enough to dissolve metal. Bacteria could not survive in that environment. Every textbook said so. Every professor said so. Every pathologist who had ever looked at a stomach slide and seen something strange had assumed it was contamination.

Warren kept looking. He kept seeing it. He started photographing it. He began to suspect that what he was looking at was not contamination at all. It was a living organism that had figured out how to survive somewhere life was not supposed to exist.

For three years he could find almost no one in the hospital who would listen to him.

In 1981, a 30-year-old internal medicine trainee named Barry Marshall rotated through Warren's department. He was assigned the routine task of helping investigate twenty difficult gastrointestinal cases. Warren showed him the bacteria. Marshall, unlike everyone else in the department, did not dismiss it. He found it interesting. The two of them began a collaboration that would consume the next four years of their lives.

They biopsied one hundred patients. They cultured the tissue. Every patient with a duodenal ulcer had the bacteria. Every single one.

Marshall was 32 years old when he stood up at the 1983 Royal Australian College of Physicians meeting in Perth and presented the findings. He proposed that the spiral bacteria, now provisionally classified as Campylobacter pyloridis and later renamed Helicobacter pylori, were the actual cause of most peptic ulcers. The disease the medical world had been treating as a stress disorder for decades was an infection. It could be cured with two weeks of antibiotics.

The room laughed at him.

The senior gastroenterologists who had built their careers on the stress theory of ulcers were not interested in being told they had been wrong for thirty years. The pharmaceutical industry had just rolled out a new generation of acid-suppressing drugs called H2 blockers, beginning with Tagamet, which was on its way to becoming the best-selling drug in the world. The combined revenue of acid-suppressant drugs would peak at roughly 6 billion US dollars per year. Telling that industry their products treated the symptoms of an infection that could be cured with thirty dollars of antibiotics was not a popular position.

Marshall spent the next year trying to prove the theory with an animal model. He could not get the bacteria to infect rats. He could not get them to infect pigs. The bacteria was so well adapted to the human stomach that it apparently refused to live anywhere else. Without an animal model, the medical establishment had a perfect reason to keep dismissing him. He had no way to prove cause and effect.

In July 1984, he made a decision he later described in his Nobel lecture in language so understated it almost vanished off the page.

He decided to use himself.

The detail that should disturb every reader is what he did before he drank the bacteria.

He had himself endoscoped first. A camera went down his throat and into his stomach. The biopsy confirmed his stomach was healthy. No bacteria. No inflammation. No ulcers. He was a perfectly normal stomach in a perfectly normal 32-year-old body.

He pretreated with a single 600 milligram dose of cimetidine. This was an acid-suppressing drug intended to give the bacteria a fighting chance against his stomach's natural defenses. He did not want the experiment to fail because his acid killed the bug before it could colonize.

He took a culture from a patient with chronic dyspepsia. The patient's bacteria had been confirmed sensitive to standard antibiotics, so Marshall would be able to cure himself afterward if needed. He mixed the bacteria into about half a cup of warm beef broth. The concentration was roughly one billion live organisms per dose.

On Tuesday morning, July 12, 1984, at 10 AM, in the hospital laboratory at Fremantle Hospital in Western Australia, he drank it.

He told nobody.

He went home that evening and ate dinner with his wife and four young children. He did not tell his wife either.

For three days nothing happened. Then on the fourth day, he started to feel bloated. His appetite collapsed. He noticed that food felt strange in his stomach. His mother visited and recoiled. She told him his breath was so bad it smelled like something had died inside him. He brushed his teeth. The smell did not go away.

On day five he started vomiting. Clear watery liquid, every morning, around six AM, with no acid in it at all. The acid was missing because his stomach acid production had collapsed. The bacteria had colonized so successfully that they had shut down the very acid environment they had supposedly been incapable of surviving in.

He went back to the endoscopy lab on day ten and had another camera sent down his throat.

The footage was unmistakable. His stomach lining was inflamed across its entire surface. The biopsies showed Helicobacter pylori everywhere. Severe active gastritis. The exact pattern he had seen in hundreds of patient samples over the previous three years.

He had given himself, in ten days, the early stage of the disease the entire medical establishment had been telling him for years could not possibly be caused by a bacterium.

He still did not tell his wife.

She found out when he came home and told her over dinner. According to multiple later interviews, her response was something close to "you idiot." She made him take antibiotics immediately.

The paper appeared in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1985. It was three short paragraphs. It is now one of the most cited articles in the journal's history. It described, in dry clinical prose, a single subject who had ingested a known bacterial culture and developed the predicted clinical syndrome within the predicted timeline. The case study was one person. There was no control group. The methodology was strictly speaking against every modern principle of clinical research. The data was undeniable.

The medical world remained skeptical for another decade.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire historical record is what happened during those ten years. Senior gastroenterologists publicly mocked Marshall at conferences. He was passed over for academic positions. His career stalled. Patients across the world continued to be told their ulcers were caused by stress, spicy food, or character flaws. They continued to be prescribed acid-suppressing drugs for indefinite periods. Many of them progressed from ulcers to stomach cancer because no one was treating the underlying infection.

H. pylori is now understood to be one of the most common bacterial infections in human history. It currently colonizes roughly half of the entire global population. In countries with weaker sanitation it colonizes well over 80 percent. It is the leading cause of stomach cancer in the world, which is itself the fifth most common cancer in humans. Every case of stomach cancer that has occurred in the twenty years between Marshall's discovery and the medical establishment's acceptance of it could potentially have been prevented by a two-week course of antibiotics that already existed.

The estimate of how many lives have been saved since the treatment finally became standard is in the hundreds of millions.

By the late 1990s, large clinical trials in the United States, Europe, and Asia had replicated his findings beyond any reasonable dispute. The National Institutes of Health convened a consensus panel in 1994 and officially endorsed H. pylori as the cause of most peptic ulcers. Treatment guidelines began to change. By the early 2000s, eradication therapy with antibiotics had become the global standard of care.

On October 3, 2005, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine had been awarded jointly to J. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall.

Marshall was 54 years old. Twenty-one years had passed since the morning he drank the bacteria.

In his Nobel lecture he showed a slide that has since become famous in medical history circles. It was a comic he had drawn of himself standing in the laboratory holding the beaker, with his colleague Neil Noakes saying "Dr. Marshall you're crazy."

He included it because by the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had been called crazy professionally for so long that he had decided to make peace with it.

The most uncomfortable line in the entire historical record is the one Marshall himself has repeated in interviews many times since.

He said the medical establishment did not reject his theory because the evidence was weak. They rejected it because accepting it required admitting that they had been treating a generation of patients incorrectly, and that an entire pharmaceutical industry had been profiting from the management of a curable infection. The financial and reputational cost of being wrong was high enough that they preferred to assume the data was somehow wrong instead.

The Semmelweis reflex applies to the highest levels of modern medicine in exactly the same way it applied to nineteenth-century obstetrics.

Walk into any gastroenterology clinic today. Ask the doctors what causes most peptic ulcers.

All of them will say H. pylori.

Then ask them who proved it.

A surprising number will say his name.

Some of them will tell you the story. The 32-year-old junior doctor in Australia who could not get a senior committee to take him seriously. The Tuesday morning in July 1984. The beaker of beef broth in his hand. The mother who recoiled at his breath. The wife who called him an idiot. The decade of ridicule. The Nobel Prize.

The detail almost nobody hears in those retellings is the part of the story that should be carved into every medical school wall.

Marshall has been asked many times whether he was scared the morning he drank the bacteria. He has always said the same thing. He was not scared of dying. He was scared of being right. He knew, walking into the lab that Tuesday morning, that if his theory was correct, then the medical establishment had spent the previous half century misdiagnosing one of the most common diseases on earth. The implication was so embarrassing that the easier outcome, professionally, was for his experiment to fail.

He was hoping it would fail.

He thought he might survive being wrong.

He was not sure how the world would survive him being right.

He was 32 years old, with a wife and four children at home. He drank a billion bacteria anyway.

The thing he proved is now in every textbook.

The medicine he made obsolete is still on every pharmacy shelf, sold mostly to people who do not need it.

The infection he identified is still inside roughly half the human beings alive.

Most of them have never been tested.

Walk into the kitchen tomorrow morning. Make yourself a cup of coffee. Notice the shelf above your sink. Notice the bottle of antacids your parents kept on it. Notice that nobody ever told them that the symptom they were medicating was almost certainly an infection, and that the infection had a treatment that took two weeks and was almost always permanent.

He drank the bacteria so they would not have to.

Most of them never thanked him.

Most of them still do not know his name.

[Lim Alex @LimAlex16]

@NuryVittachi The 'Emperor' now stands exposed in all his ugly nakedness, visible to all.

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

THE PENTAGON YESTERDAY DECLARED BYD, the world’s most successful electric carmaker, to be linked to the Chinese army.

Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers and e-commerc companies, was also added to the Federal Register yesterday.

Innovative tech firm Baidu, and two chipmakers, ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies, were also written into the register, known as the “1260H list”.

Last year, the Pentagon made the same accusation at Tencent, the world’s biggest video game and entertainment company, owner of Epic Games, and a major backer of Reddit, Snapchat, Spotify and others.

.

UNFAIR
The accusations are unfair, and everybody knows it. America’s biggest firms work directly with the Pentagon at extremely deep levels with multiple joint ventures to create attack tools, yet this is never considered an issue. In contrast, Chinese firms which have the slightest interaction with their country’s army are targeted for harm by the Pentagon.

The accusation paves the way for the US to make unilateral sanctions against the firms and then use economic coercion to force its vassals (“allies”) to follow suit.

.

REAL REASON
Analysts say the real reason is to harm the work of Chinese technologists, many of whom are developing AI applications.

The US already has an unassailable lead in the sector, with more than 5,400 datacenters compared to China’s approximately 375, but Washington DC has strongly opposed the concept of fair competition in recent years.

The listing move also harms US investors, who are steered away from buying shares in companies on the register, which are some of the most innovative and fast-growing firms in the world.

[James Wood 武杰士 @commiepommie]

China is amazing!
Come see it for yourself.
Nothing beats firsthand experience. 🇨🇳❤️

[Sputnik @SputnikInt]

🚨🇨🇳 China cracks code for affordable optical chip manufacturing

Hangzhou-based micro and nanomanufacturing company Prinano says it’s created nanoimprint gear that can mass produce optical/photonic chips for 1/10 the cost of the millions-apiece ASML-made ultraviolet lithography machines

The equipment, known as the PL-AS vacuum air-cushion nanoimprint lithography (NIL), can create “customized double-layer imprinting materials and core processes” on advanced industry standard 8-inch wafers

These chips’ uses are legion and include:

🔸 data center and telecoms equipment

🔸 high-performance and quantum computing

🔸 automotive LiDAR

🔸 optical biosensors for healthcare applications

SCMP says the breakthrough, if verified over time, could prove a massive boon for China’s domestic electronics industry amid the ban of the sale of some advanced models of Dutch-made ASML equipment to the Asian nation

Besides technological sovereignty, Prinano’s new equipment means massive cost savings, equivalent to billions of dollars, the unlocking of new domestic and foreign markets and greater affordability for industrial and consumer applications

Prinano says it delivered its first semiconductor NIL system to a local customer last August. The next step should be mass production

[Laurent Michelon Officiel @LH_86_]

The upcoming #China-EU summit in Brussels on June 18th will be an opportunity to recalibrate the relationship between two economic giants.

But recalibration can mean two things, depending on who you speak to.

For China, it means working at last with an independent EU, that looks after its own interest and doesn't follow blindly the US' "decoupling" strategy, especially since last month summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump (and his impressive delegation of US top-tier CEOs), which was a hint to the possible end of that confrontational and suicidal policy from the US side.
The risk is that the EU, willingly or under US duress, will carry on with its own iteration of "decoupling", named "de-risking", which in both cases, means "de-Sinicization".

For the EU, recalibrating seems to take a much more confrontational stance towards China, as we get closer to the summit.
First, with the recently law adopted by the EU Commission on "Industrial Accelerators" which I described here ( https://t.co/zn2nJJinrV ).

Second, with the opportunistic move by some EU member-states (unfortunately, France is leading the charge) to press for a firmer line on Beijing, warning that Chinese "overproduction" (a word specifically created for China, meaning "trade surplus", which is a virtuous goal to pursue for Western economies, but a sin when it comes to China), and "low-priced exports" (another rhetorical device to say "I can't be as competitive as you, please raise your prices").

The contrast is stark between Macron's cooperative stance and declarations of friendship and mutual benefit with China when he traveled there, and his bending over backwards to please Washington D.C.'s in being the primary bulwark against China in the EU. In doing so so, Macron shows his willingness to toe the line of Ursula vdLeyen, who three years ago was already announcing the end of free trade, as "the imperative for security and control now trumps the logic of free markets and open trade".

"Free markets and open trade" were the motto of Western countries for decades. It turns out it was just a tool designed to subvert developing countries that were not submitted to liberal democracy.
Now that China can compete with and win over the West in the technological, manufacturing and economic spheres, these principles are thrown out the window, and replaced with the good old protectionism that Western countries vilified for decades.
By constantly hammering that "the trade deficit with China is unsustainable", EU leaders are in fact claiming their impotence to re-industrialize the EU (after de-industrializing it for four decades), not to mention to bring it back to world class standards.
What is disturbing is their willingness to swiftly blame China for it, instead of identifying the causes of de-industrialisation, and punishing the culprits first.

Mistakenly convinced that "China needs the EU more than the EU needs China", EU decision makers could be in for an unpleasant surprise. The last time a superpower made such an overconfident statement was in 2017, when Trump ignited a trade war with China. On his second attempt in 2025, it backfired tremendously, China having used the past 8 years to decouple itself from the US : today, China's exports to the US amount to only 2% of China GDP. Nice to have, but can do without.

If they carry on with their threats and decide to play hard ball with China, EU leaders could be the ones derailing Europe's economy beyond repair.

Negotiating on an equal foot with China, without resorting to last minute strong-arm tactics, is the way to get China to accompany EU's economic revival.

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

Here’s what really happened.

[Shenzhen Channel @sz_mediagroup]

🪷 The 36th Shenzhen Lotus Festival will bloom at Honghu Park(洪湖公园) from June 12 to July 12, featuring over 1 million lotus flowers across 170,000 sqm of ponds.
In the lead-up to the APEC Summit in Shenzhen, this year's show celebrates lotus culture across the Asia-Pacific, with rare varieties from the United States, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and beyond.
As the Greater Bay Area's largest and most influential lotus festival, it draws over 1 million visitors each year.
Escape the summer heat and dive into a sea of lotus blooms in Shenzhen!
Video from 深圳城管 明哥拍摄

@TripInChina @LivingChina @thisisGBA @Shenzhen_style @ShenzhenPages

[Richard @ricwe123]

When the illusion finally shatters, what’s left isn’t just disappointment,it’s total embarrassment.
The man you invested your faith in isn’t a savior at all, just an empty act stitched together with arrogance, noise, and relentless self-promotion.
All that confidence, all those grand promises, all the swagger,it collapses into something painfully small the moment it’s tested against reality.

There’s no hidden genius, no bold disruptor underneath it all.
Just a loud, impulsive figure flailing through responsibilities he clearly wasn’t equipped to handle, drowning incompetence in a flood of bluster.

In the end, what once looked like strength turns out to be nothing more than cheap theatrics.
Not leadership,just a gaudy performance.

A caricature.
A spectacle.

And the real sting isn’t that it was absurd,it’s realizing how long it took to admit you were taken in by all his bullshit....

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Good take by @adam_tooze in the FT.

I think a good analogy to use is this: imagine Saudi Arabia offered to sell their oil wells at 80% off, and you could somehow ship them home. You'd call any leader who refused that deal a complete fool.

Well that's pretty much what China is doing with solar panels.

That's what people fail to understand: there's such intense competition and so much supply in China - the so-called "involution" phenomenon - that it's YOU, as a customer, who's getting subsidized when you buy solar panels. This is literally China paying your energy bill.

And it's like oil wells because, once it's installed, there's no dependency. You buy it once, and for three decades (the average lifespan of a solar panel) you're extracting energy from your own sun, just like an oil well extracts from your own ground. It's one of the most sovereign energy asset you can buy.

The rational response when you see this is to buy as many as you can, as fast as you can. All the more when you're Europe and you have massive energy supply problems (and no solar industry of your own to protect).

But no, we scream "overcapacity" and put up tariffs. We're so deep into geopolitical brainworms that we can't recognize the best deal in the history of energy.

Src for the article: https://t.co/BMB8wBJEAm

[เด็กวิด @Phakchira_e]

จังหวะที่ฝูเป่าหันมาเจอคุณตาคัง 😭

ฝูเป่าเกิดที่เกาหลี มีคุณตาคังดูแลตั้งแต่อยู่ในท้อง ฝูเป่าดื้อกับทุกคนยกเว้นคุณตา เป็นเจ้าหญิงของคุณตา เมื่อฝูเป่าอายุ 4ขวบ ต้องกลับจีนตามกฎ สิ่งที่คุณตากลัวที่สุดคือ กลัวฝูเป่าจำจะคุณตาไม่ได้ ... แต่ถึงจะผ่านไปนานแค่ไหน ฝูเป่าก็ไม่ลืม

[James Wood 武杰士 @commiepommie]

🇨🇳 Right now across China, cities are deliberately going quiet

Here in Xiamen the rules are clear and city-wide: no car horns, no loud construction or renovation work and no unnecessary noise. It’s not subtle and it’s not just Xiamen.

The Gaokao, China’s National College Entrance Examination, started today.

Roughly 12.9 million students are sitting it over the next couple of days, with some provinces running through the 9th or 10th. Their scores will largely decide which university they attend and, for many, shape the direction their lives take. In a country this size and this competitive, that’s not an abstraction.

What gets me the most living here isn’t the pressure, though it’s real and everyone feels it. It’s the collective seriousness.

This isn’t a top-down crackdown. It’s not students being treated as cogs in a machine either. It’s a society deciding, at scale, that the next generation’s education is worth temporarily reorganising daily life around. Construction pauses, traffic patterns shift and the police are out, but not in the way Western headlines tend to imply.

Here in Xiamen I’ve seen them gently reminding drivers and workers to keep the noise down. Polite, professional and focused on protecting students’ concentration rather than making a show of authority. The goal is simple: give these kids the best possible shot at performing when it counts.

That attitude works for bigger things.

China doesn’t lead the world in EVs, high-speed rail, renewables, advanced manufacturing and a growing share of frontier STEM fields by accident. The reason it’s leading is that it sees developing its people as a main national focus, not an optional extra or a political distraction. The Gaokao is one visible expression of that. A highly competitive, performance-driven process that funnels talent into the organisation on a vast scale.

When a country of 1.4 billion people decides its children’s education is important enough to quiet entire cities for it, you start to understand the results you see in patents, infrastructure and technological development speed.

Western coverage tends to reduce this to “exam hell” or “rote memorisation factories.” That framing misses the point. What you’re seeing here is the practical outcome of consistent, long-term investment in the next generation, defined by concrete actions that underscore the principle that those who prepare for the future will own it.

The kids sitting these exams today will be the ones building, innovating and leading the next phase of what’s happening here.

The country is making sure they get the quiet they need to do it.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

Seven years later, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife made their second visit to North Korea.

Most Westerners have never been to North Korea.
They know almost nothing about its people, its education system, its daily life, its history, or how a country survives decades of sanctions, isolation, military pressure, and ideological demonization.

But in their imagination, North Korea already exists as a completed villain template.
Dark.
Backward.
Brainwashed.
Poor.
Disposable.

A cartoon state built for Western moral theater.

China has been placed into the same narrative machine, only on a larger scale.
Not a civilization.
Not a country.
Not 1.4 billion human beings with history, memory, labor, grief, ambition, and survival.

Just “the authoritarian threat.”
A giant villain with ports, factories, missiles, AI models, high-speed rail, engineers, and 5,000 years of civilizational continuity.

That is how Western ideology works.

First, it removes human complexity.
Then it replaces reality with a label.
Then it treats the label as evidence.

“Dictatorship.”
“Regime.”
“Threat.”
“Axis.”
“Rogue state.”
“Authoritarian bloc.”

Once the label is installed, no fact is allowed to disturb it.

If a sanctioned country survives, it is propaganda.
If its people are educated, it is indoctrination.
If life expectancy rises, it is ignored.
If it builds industry, it is militarization.
If it resists Western pressure, it is aggression.

This is why the West misunderstands both China and North Korea.

It does not study them as societies.
It consumes them as villains.