Eva and I spoke about why Huawei’s rise to the technological lead has so terrified the West, whether the rise of AI models capable of advanced hacking will change the balance of power, and whether Huawei really is a wing of the Chinese intelligence services.

In 2018, Huawei was accused of pinging back information overnight from the African Union headquarters – a building China had funded. And now it’s accused of defying US sanctions in Iran. Whatever the truth, Huawei’s rise shows that telecommunications and geopolitics are inextricably linked.

Huawei is often accused of spying for China. But how was the US so sure that Huawei’s technology could be used for spying? Because they had already hacked it and were using it to spy themselves. I spoke to Eva Dou, an expert on Huawei, for ‘Do Your Own Research’ Link below

The trend itself might be declining, but the generations-long anticommunist propaganda of the American state is finally decisively broken. Let me know what you think!

We got Chinamaxxing regardless, because it turned out China could offshore its propaganda to the US’s own spectacle machine (the first example of China-to-America reshoreing?)

We also talked about Chinese soft power. It has long been pretty inept, such as Wolf Warrior propaganda films that might work domestically, but are at best laughable overseas.

Our conversation went much deeper than commentary on Chinese memes, taking in the history of the Chinese internet, from its early utopian moments to the hemisphere-scale computing stack that exists now. That includes the now post-mining town of Fuxin, now home to thousands of Chinese influencers.

Tianyu is not just a writer on culture, he’s a PhD student in information technology and global liberalism in the late 20th century – and therefore the perfect guide to this topic.

I want to know if we can actually see China clearly from the West. Or is the best we can do what @kaiserkuo.bsky.social recommends: that we work out the optical properties of the lens we are looking at China through?

Since I went to China in April, I’ve been puzzling over the perils of what I call the ‘gawp-zone’: Walk around Shanghai, or any major city, and you will be overwhelmed by the skylines, the infrastructure, the sense of a country moving very fast. This series asks what lies beyond that rush.

looking forward to the invention of a new form of media that lets people bemoan "no one scrolls anymore"

it's been longer since the great financial crisis than the GFC was from the fall of the berlin wall