Editor’s note for Thursday, July 22, 2021

Some signs of the times that caught my eye today:

“The U.S. and China are both failing the global leadership test” in their responses to the pandemic, says Howard French: “Where it counts most — meaning for the well-being of the largest numbers of people in the world — there is no real leadership competition.”

Hong Kong police have arrested five speech therapists who published a children’s book deemed seditious, explaining via Twitter:

5 execs of speech therapists’ union #ARRESTED—suspected of conspiring to distribute seditious publications (kids’ storybooks sugarcoating protesters’ unlawful acts+glorifying fugitives fleeing #HK etc.) w/ intent to corrupt the minds of 4 to 7-yr-olds. 2 yrs in jail if convicted!

The New York Times has more on the story if you are interested in Hong Kong’s rapid recent adoption of the hypersensitive, paranoid censorship style familiar to anyone who has lived in mainland China.

“For decades, the West has ignored the significance of China’s rise — but we must recognise that it will be instrumental in all our futures,” writes historian Adam Tooze in a new essay. If you enjoy that, you might also like his appearance on our Sinica Podcast last year, talking about the politics of the pandemic.

China has prison facilities that could hold more than a million Muslims in Xinjiang according to a new report from journalists Megha Rajagopalan and Alison Killing, who have done some of the earliest and best-researched work on abuses in the Uyghur homeland.

Our word of the day is from the Chinese government press conference described in our top story:

The search for early cases of the disease should be conducted in many countries and in many places around the world.

在全球多国多地范围内开展早期病例搜索
zài quánqiú duōguó duōdì fànwéinèi kāizhǎn zǎoqī bìnglì sōusuǒ

Upcoming event: July 29: Classical Chinese medicine and our modern world.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief