Editor’s note for Thursday, March 18, 2021

My thoughts today:

The optimism of low expectations is how I am viewing the meeting today and tomorrow between senior U.S. and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska. The face-to-face “gives both sides a chance to reset the stormy relationship between the world’s two largest economies,” says the Wall Street Journal, but I will be happy if no one is bleeding when the whole thing is over.

However, the messaging that comes from Alaska will probably set the tone for relations between the two powers for months to come.

We’ll keep you posted in this space tomorrow, and you can find lots of links to analysis and commentary in today’s Politics and Current Affairs section below.

If you need news NOW, Vincent Lee of Reuters is live-tweeting the meetings.

The Alaska meetings will probably affect the trials of the two detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, which start tomorrow and continue Monday. Neither man has been given consular access, as of today.

“They make a lot of noise,” says wildlife photographer Robert Ferguson, author of Wild Creatures in Hong Kong, of the Asian koel, one of the territory’s many interesting birds, which has returned for the spring.

Our word of the day is Pīnduōduō 拼多多, the company whose name roughly means “bunch of stuff put together.”

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief