Editor’s note for Wednesday, October 21, 2020

My thoughts today:

Draw your own conclusions: Our top story today looks at reports that Donald Trump has a secret bank account in China. But in Beijing, state media is emphasizing commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Korean War attended by Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, Xi’s visits with veterans, and his support for the families of serving soldiers (all links to Chinese articles from the People’s Daily).

From the Economist correspondent Stephanie Studer:

Towards the end of my time in Yunnan this summer, I traveled to Lijiang for a story on the gorgeous pictographs of the Dongba script. It is the writing system of the Naxi, a local ethnic group, and dates back to the 7th century. Yet it was never widely used; village shamans wrote the symbols down as memory aids to recall the sequence of especially long chants. About 600 in the region can still read and write Dongba today — and so it hangs on as the world’s last living pictographic script.

I spoke about Dongba on yesterday’s episode of our podcast, The Intelligence. My segment is at the end, but the first is about our cover story on the Uyghurs, and I urge you to listen to that too.

On the Economist’s cover story on the Uyghurs, see also this Twitter thread from Economist correspondent Gady Epstein (formerly based in Beijing, now in New York) with links to the Economist’s articles and an excellent range of sources, journalists, and other places to read more.

Our words of the day are: Trump opened a secret Chinese bank account, and Trump’s Chinese bank account exposed — both headlines from Chinese websites about the latest Trump revelations:

• 川普在中国的银行开设未公开账户
  chuānpǔ zài zhōngguó de yínháng kāishè wèigōngkāi zhànghù
• 特朗普中国的银行账户曝光
  tèlǎngpǔ zhōngguó de yínháng zhànghù pùguāng

Note that the first headline calls Trump 川普 chuānpǔ, which is the transliteration of his name that is more popular among his Chinese fans. The second calls him 特朗普 tèlǎngpǔ, which is the rendering favored by the Chinese government and its media outlets.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief