Editor’s note for Tuesday, September 15, 2020

My thoughts today:

Black voices in the China space is the title of a recent Sinica Podcast in which my colleague Kaiser Kuo interviews Keisha Brown, Mark Akpaninyie, and Leland Lazarus about initiatives they’re involved with to increase black representation in China-related fields.

On a different but related subject: The One in a Billion podcast recently did a show with Eileen Huang, whose recent open letter urging the Chinese-American community to confront their anti-black racism generated quite a bit of conversation online.

Yvonne Preston was the Sydney Morning Herald’s China correspondent from 1975 to 1978. In an essay for that newspaper, she writes:

The swift and unceremonious exit of two Australian journalists from Beijing after a midnight knock on the door shows the situation for foreign correspondents in China to be apparently worse now and considerably riskier than it was in the mid-1970s at the tail end of the brutal Cultural Revolution.

On a lighter note, Preston also mentions a delightful response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry to a journalist’s question: “We have no comment and you may not say that we have no comment.”

The Qiao Collective is a pro-Chinese Communist Party Twitter account. Recently, a large number of parody accounts have sprung up — all named “collective” preceded by a Chinese word that rhymes with Qiao, everything from Biao to Xiao. Brian Hioe explains what’s going on (with all the links you need).

Our word of the day is many growth rate indicators turn positive (多指标增速转正 duō zhǐbiāo zēngsù zhuǎnzhèng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief