Editor’s note for Monday, August 23, 2021

My thoughts today:

Neither Alibaba nor Ant Group are officially named in a new corruption probe into the Communist Party Secretary of Hangzhou. But that city is home to Jack Ma’s Alibaba and Ant Group and rumors are swirling.

Here is one of the more interesting reactions to the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, not as much because of what it says but because of who the author is: In Afghanistan, China is ready to step into the void for the New York Times by Zhōu Bō 周波, a former senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army.

The key sentence is the final one of the piece:

Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.

That seems, to me, naive.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Biden has picked his ambassador to China: longtime former senior State Department official Nicholas Burns.

Our word of the day is “Co-existence with the virus” is absolutely not feasible (“与病毒共存”绝不可行 “yǔ bìngdú gòngcún” juébù kěxíng). That is according to former Chinese health minister Gāo Qiáng 高强 (in Chinese). See our top story today for more.

Chengdu storytelling, in case you missed it last week: Here is a video we produced about “Monologue,” a collection of graphic nonfiction stories created by Jacob Wanuch, who has lived in that city since January 2017.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief