CCP

In my September 2023 post “Xi Jinping has ruined China”, I wrote: Since Xi expelled foreign journalists for doing their jobs, I’ve been struggling to find quality, unbiased coverage of China, since much English-language coverage of China comes directly from the Chinese government, its paid Western shills (“white monkeys”) who are some of the few foreigners remaining in China, or Falun Gong-owned media. I recently discovered a pair of westerners (one American; one South African) who each lived in China for over a decade, motorcycled all across the country, and married Chinese women. They loved pre-Xi China but eventually fled with their families and are now sharing their honest perspectives on and footage of Xi Jinping’s China. I’ve watched a ton of their videos (albeit skipping the annoying ads) and have learned a lot from their Youtube channels: ...

Aside from the thousands of Chinese protestors – possibly 10,000 – murdered by the CCP in the Tiananmen Massacre, I long admired post-Deng Xiaoping China and its pragmatic approach to economic growth that lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. And 28 years ago, I married an amazing woman from China and began seriously studying Mandarin. As I was completing my economics Ph.D., I had a fellowship to study advanced Chinese the following year and was excited to be choosing between The Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP) at Tsinghua University (China’s MIT) and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center when the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on May 7, 1999. On TV, I watched Chinese hurl Molotov cocktails at the US Embassy, where I had recently helped a fellow Stanford economics Ph.D. student from China skip the line. Instead of pursuing my dream of becoming a professor of Chinese political economy, I drifted into tech but have remained fascinated by China. ...