Editor’s note for Thursday, December 16, 2021

My thoughts today:

“L’état, c’est moi” — The state, it is me, said Louis XIV, who was king of France from ​​1643, when he was five years old, to 1715 when he died at the age of 76.

That is about the right way to think about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平. And this also means that no one else but Xi will be allowed to speak for China in the next few years. This is what’s really going on behind the much-discussed “retirement” of Hú Xījìn 胡锡进, editor of the Communist Party tabloid Global Times, and Twitter gladiator.

The news about Hu’s retirement comes just days after the Guardian published a profile of him: China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor became the voice of Chinese nationalism.

This is a media story, so I am personally drawn to it, and I have very much enjoyed all the media coverage of it. If you like getting into the weeds a little, these are the pieces I’d read:

• Hu Xijin, China’s greatest internet troll: “How a free speech fanboy came to represent the Chinese Communist Party’s id.” / The China Project (October 2020)
• Hu Xijin, one of China’s most influential propagandists, leaves Global Times amid speculation of a forced retirement / Globe and Mail
• Good bye Hu Xijin / China Media Project

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., this is what we have: “U.S. military commanders in the Pacific have built a software tool to predict how the Chinese government will react to U.S. actions in the region like military sales, U.S.-backed military activity and even congressional visits to hotspots like Taiwan,” per Reuters.

The Pentagon could have saved a lot of money if they had just paid for a The China Project subscription!

By the way, if you like what we do, please give a subscription as a holiday gift! Click here if you want to give gift subscriptions.

Our word of the day is forced labor (强迫劳动 qiǎngpò láodòng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief