Editor’s note for Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Dear reader,

First, thank you for your support of our work! Now I’d like to make a case for why what we do is important — and, if I may be permitted a little self-promotion, why you should tell all your friends about us!

Kara Swisher is one of the best journalists covering the American tech industry. She’s done it for years and personally knows all the key players in Silicon Valley, but she has not let her insider status stop her from criticizing them. Since she started her career in the early days of the internet in the 1990s, the tech industry has eaten the world, and so her newish podcast, Sway, touches on everything from regulation of social media companies to artificial intelligence and gender politics, as seen by the influential guests she interviews every week.

She also writes a column for the New York Times. The latest installment is The crackdown in China is a hot mess, and it’s coming for us. It offers a rather cartoonish picture of China’s tech crackdown, but I’d like to cite some of her points as further evidence that being informed about China is now essential if you want to remain informed about the world: Citing Tencent’s “big investments in U.S. firms like…Epic Games,” Swisher says that this “ongoing blending of tech companies globally will only get stickier amid escalating tensions between the United States and China and make it increasingly difficult to cooperate when necessary.”

She does not sound too excited about it, but she concludes that “we might want to start spending more time thinking about China.”

Also thinking about China even though they don’t want to: The New Zealand government. As I mentioned yesterday, the antipodean nation “will have some kind of dustup with China” this year, per our prediction in January, or as described by scholar Catherine Churchman, who just a few weeks ago wrote:

Rest assured, once the PRC is in a position to force New Zealand into silence or worse still, into vociferous support of its activities at home and abroad, it will use its power to do so, and that will be the end of New Zealand’s proclaimed “independent foreign policy.”

Well, now it begins. China’s embassy in Wellington today “summoned New Zealand foreign officials to a meeting after the government voiced criticism of Chinese state-funded hacking, raising industry concerns over trade implications,” reports Radio New Zealand.

Our word of the day is a once-in-more-than-five-thousand-years event (重现期均超5000年一遇 chóngxiàn qī jūn chāo wǔqiān nián yī yù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief