Editor’s note for Monday, May 17, 2021

My thoughts today:

How does China see the deadly conflict in Gaza? Beijing has since Saturday issued daily statements calling for peace and offering to mediate. But there’s a big difference between official statements and popular discussion.

Here is a summary from Niva Yau on Twitter. It’s pithy — there’s no nuance, and you could object to the characterization as being too crude, but Yau neatly captures the strange bifurcation of rhetoric in China on the subject:

Chinese in China are so divided towards Israel-Palestine. CCP backs Palestine on many fronts, official narrative is anti-Israel largely because of pro-U.S. stance. But Chinese in China are anti-Palestine because they are Islamophobic, prefer “non-barbaric” Israelis. It’s fascinating.

“Internal Apple documents reviewed by The New York Times, interviews with 17 current and former Apple employees and four security experts, and new filings made in a court case in the United States last week provide rare insight into the compromises Mr. Cook has made to do business in China,” says a new report by Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi.

The NYT says the report offers “an extensive inside look — many aspects of which have never been reported before — at how Apple has given in to escalating demands from the Chinese authorities,” and shows how just as Apple CEO Tim Cook “figured out how to make China work for Apple, China is making Apple work for the Chinese government.”

Our word of the day is Tianwen-1 (天问一号 tiānwèn yīhào), the name of the craft orbiting around Mars which will relay images from China’s first rover on the Red Planet.

“Tianwen” is a reference to a classical Chinese poem usually translated as Questions to Heaven, which comprises 172 questions about contradictions within traditional Chinese cosmology.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief