China

A lifetime ago, I discovered my life’s calling… Well, it would have, could have, should have been my life’s calling… Unfortunately, the US government literally blew up my plan! (And I mean “literally” literally, not as an intensifier for figuratively, as so many do these days.) How the US literally blew up my life’s dream, causing me to stop studying Mandarin for 25 years I studied government in college and was studying economics in grad school when I met my wife, a physics PhD student from China....

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....

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....