Loretto Cooney

Visual Artist, Art Tutor, Lecturer in Art History/Critical Theory.
Freelance Tech Editor: Aviation, Blockchain, Scientific industries. Communications writer.

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@ZhaiXiang5 No that I have arrived in China, once again, I am backtracking on your informative history posts.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Yet another absolutely perfect example of how Western leaders don't understand China at all, and how that's ultimately detrimental... to them.

The "Plaza Accord" is pretty much universally seen in China as the textbook case of Western economic imperialism - the moment America weaponized currency policy to kneecap Japan. And, case in point, it's widely seen as the trigger for Japan's so-called "lost decades."

Plus there's of course the profound idiocy of telling the Chinese you want to treat them like the Japanese...

Explicitly saying that's your objective is just about the single best thing you can say to rally all of China against whatever it is you're proposing.

Src for article: https://t.co/1wwF2aZ3s4

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The genius of the American regime was never that it convinced everyone to agree.

It was that it convinced millions to hate each other more than they hated the class robbing them both.

That trick is failing now.

Because the debts are too visible.

The wars are too stupid.

The media is too absurd.

The border is too managed.

The cities are too decayed.

The hypocrisy is too total.

And the elite deviance is too constant to keep calling incidental.

At some point the audience stops booing the actors and storms the accounting office.

That moment is approaching.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Instead of attacking Trump for failing to do enough to make peace with Iran, Democrats are calling him a weak little bitch for agreeing to ensure $300 billion in reconstruction financing.

“Iran took Trump to the cleaners with this so-called understanding,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor on Thursday, adding, “Are my colleagues on the other side of the aisle prepared to send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are so severe here at home? That’s what Trump wants them to do.”

“With $300 billion, we could end homelessness, fund cancer research for 40 years, and give every child free pre-K for over 7 years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran,” tweeted Senator Amy Klobuchar.

“Here’s what this deal basically is: Iran makes zero concessions, and the United States lets Iran trade oil for free and commits to give them $300 billion in reparations,” said Senator Chris Murphy.

“Trump is touting a ‘deal’ that promises to lift all sanctions, allow Iran to export oil and potentially charge tolls, and hand over more than 300 billion dollars to that country,” said Senator Adam Schiff, adding that the deal “looks more like a surrender.”

These prominent Democrats make it sound like Trump is just taking $300 billion from the American taxpayer, when according to Reuters the financing for the deal “will be comprised entirely of private-sector funds.” Democrats are essentially running the same bogus “Obama gave Iran pallets of cash” attack that Republicans used to use when slamming the 2015 JCPOA.

More importantly, how revealing is it that these warmongering freaks are suddenly pretending care about how much $300 billion could do to help ordinary Americans? Whenever anyone tries to nudge the party an inch to the left on universal healthcare or whatever you see Democratic Party officials wagging their fingers at them telling them there’s no money for such pie-in-the-sky fantasies, but as soon as they get an opportunity to push for more war they’re out there saying they could use all that peace money to end homelessness. All of which will of course be right out the window when it comes time to vote for the next $1.5 trillion military budget.

Democrats are such obnoxious liars. Their sleaziness is exceeded only by Trump supporters claiming their president deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for losing a war he started.

Anyway, things are a mess. We’ll see how this all plays out.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

Literally, the whole fucking world came to their aid, gave them someone else’s country, paid them reparations unprecedented in human history. But it’s not enough. They think they should be able to get away with genocide, colonial expansion, and endless looting and pillaging around the world.

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Imagine a historian who produces a history of the Soviet Union using only Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto as references and source material. The Bolshevik Revolution, Leninism, the Stalin-Trotsky conflict, the Great Purge, the Second World War, the Cold War, Glasnost and Perestroika, the collapse of the USSR. All of this and everything else about the Soviet Union, our historian assures us, can be understood and only understood through a proper reading and understanding of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

Now imagine this historian follows up with a history of the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, Maoism, the Sino-Soviet split, the US-Chinese rapprochement, the Cultural Revolution, China’s post-Mao economic transformation, all of this and everything else is once again explained through the prism of Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century texts and nothing else.

You would be a fool to take this historian seriously. The produced texts would provide only the most superficial understanding of the USSR and PRC, while severely distorting a proper understanding of these states, their governments, societies, economies, culture, and foreign relations.

But convinced the formula is foolproof, the historian then writes a history of Israel, based on nothing other than the Old Testament and Talmud. From the 1897 Basel Program to the policies of the current Israeli government, everything is explained on the basis of these sacred texts. Even the current Israeli meltdown over the US-Iran MoU is interpreted through the prism of ancient scripture.

If this sounds laughable, that is because it indisputably is.

But for some reason, we are expected to take seriously the hucksters who insist on explaining every development in the twenty-first century Middle East, and every action by any Muslim, by citing this or that passage from the Quran, or this or that statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.

[Simon Dixon @SimonDixonTwitt]

🇸🇾🇹🇷 Remember, I’ve always said Syria is now influenced far more by GCC and Turkish interests than Israeli ones.

Yes, the current leader was formerly associated with ISIS.

Like many militias in the region, ISIS was never simply an ideological movement.

It functioned as a proxy force that was, at different times, funded, armed, infiltrated, and leveraged by various state and intelligence actors to advance geopolitical objectives (mainly Israel & hence MIC).

I’ve always argued that this isn’t primarily about ideology, it’s about power, money, and geopolitics.

Al-Jolani is no longer an Israeli puppet.

The reality today is that Syria’s future is being shaped far more by Gulf capital, Turkish influence, regional trade corridors, and economic interests than by any single foreign intelligence agenda.

🇸🇦 Trump is FIC and GCC aligned.

🇮🇱 Israel is a MIC toxic asset.

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@FoxNews For optics sake I suppose;

[Patryk Floyd @floyd_patryk]

@NuryVittachi Thank you for your work, Mr Vittachi.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a very good example of how democracy works at a local level in China 👇

To explain succinctly, at every administrative level in China, they have a "people's congress" (人民代表大会 - rénmín dàibiǎo dàhuì).

At the county, district and township level, representatives are directly elected by voters in their constituencies. Above that (prefectural cities, provinces, and the National People's Congress) - representatives are elected by the congress one level below.

Depending on the location, local people's congresses have more or less oversight power on local spending, appointments, and policy.

Zhejiang province is one of the places in China where people's congresses have the most power after an official named Xi Jinping - you may have heard of the guy - established a framework called "do practical things for the people" (为民办实事 - wèi mín bàn shí shì) when he was provincial party secretary in the early 2000s.

What "do practical things for the people" established was a principle that local people's congress representatives should have a direct say in how local public money got spent. Over time, this evolved into a formal voting system where representatives vote on proposed government projects.

They just exercised this power in a major way: the Huangyan District People's Congress (黄岩区人大) in Taizhou, Zhejiang voted on 16 major government investment projects for 2026 but killed two of them on the spot - a sports center and an irrigation megaproject, totaling over a billion yuan - with roughly 80% voting against.

This doesn't mean these 2 projects are dead forever but they're sent back to the drawing board. The responsible departments have to address whatever concerns representatives raised, bring in experts for further review, and resubmit when they're ready.

This is a level of local democracy that many people will probably be surprised exists in China: it's genuine democratic oversight, they can actually block government spending, and the executive has to go back and try again.

It's also - and this is where China is complex - something that surprised many people in China.

As I mentioned above, not all people's congresses have this sort of power and the story generated a lot of national interest - with many national outlets writing about it, such as Guancha (https://t.co/Ad94EJH3vt) or The Paper (https://t.co/EPPcXQxXRV).

So much so that the Zhejiang People's Congress deleted their original WeChat post about it. We don't know why - the story wasn't suppressed since so many state media outlets carried it - but the Zhejiang People's Congress probably didn't love being the face of a national debate about why other provinces aren't doing this too, as it amounts to throwing shade on their peers. I genuinely don't know, just a hypothesis.

Anyhow, that's China in all its complexity and why sweeping narratives about it are always wrong: a country where elected local representatives can genuinely exercise oversight power over the government thanks to reforms initiated by Xi Jinping himself, and where mainstream media boast about it, but where the provincial organ that broke the story would rather avoid the publicity.

[Dr Andrew O'Malley @OMalleyFife]

I read every new paper in AI × medical education each week, then write you a 5-minute letter on what mattered. Free, every Monday.

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@RnaudBertrand As a rule this is something we know to check regarding other subject mater so we should double be mindful regarding China. Trad Western media are not ready to change just yet.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Ridiculous China scare story of the day.

As a rule of thumb, you can always safely dismiss stories that claim "China" did something, as if all actions by anyone related to China were a coordinated act of the Chinese government.

Plus in this instance, if you read the article what "China" stands for is "a group linked to China," which contradicts their own headline: "a group linked to China" isn't "China."

As far as we know it could just be Apple employees: they're literally "a group linked to China" 🤷

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇮🇱🇺🇸 Israel's National Security Minister, Ben Gvir, canceled his family trip to the U.S over visa fears

He attended the U.S embassy after being told he'd have to have his fingerprints taken before any visa was issued

Then, after being interviewed by embassy staff he pulled the trip, claiming he was worried the visa might not arrive in time

Others were casting doubt on whether he'd get a visa at all, especially after he was filmed verbally abusing Gaza flotilla activists

Source: Times of Israel / Writer: Ian

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@yousef_ki1 ...

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@InsiderWorld_1 🇮🇪🇵🇸

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read.

It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60+ Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this.

First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks.

For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms.

The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors.

How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc.

Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor.

That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors.

This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game.

Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this.

First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own.

It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground.

Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required.

Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself.

In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened.

Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial.

I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution.

That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated.

To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars.

But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine.

I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man."

The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of.

Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": https://t.co/1NZgHqBHwg).

When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins.

This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market.

The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise.

This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle.

Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao.

What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers?

The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed.

The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation.

We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission.

All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.

[Zhai Xiang @ZhaiXiang5]

Thank you, Arnaud, for sharing this. It reminds me of an event eight years ago, when Jack Ma, Li Shufu and other Chinese entrepreneurs held a roundtable discussion with the then British Prime Minister. I was there in person.

At the time, I heard Li Shufu tell the British Prime Minister that he was willing to invest more in the UK vehicle industry, but felt that there were significant policy obstacles in the UK. The Prime Minister did not give a clear or helpful response. Looking back, I think that was a missed opportunity.

The rise of China’s EV industry was not simply the result of the state “picking winners.” It was more the outcome of central-government objectives, local competition, entrepreneurial risk-taking by private businesspeople, and the long-term accumulation of industrial capabilities all working together.

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@wereontheditch @TadhgHickey I want to know who in government is investing in businesses in the illegal settler areas. 🇮🇪🇵🇸🇮🇷

[Loretto Cooney @lorettocooney]

@gizver2 @AlanDaitch Have you been? Take a look at some of their iconic libraries. They encourage not just reading but wonder for kids and adults alike. Amazing architecture. Chinese people love their books.