Editor’s note for Thursday, January 20, 2022

My thoughts today:

China’s great closing continues: Today brought news that authorities in the city of Guangzhou want anyone who receives international mail or parcels from abroad to take a COVID test.

Inequality in Beijing is the buzz of the Chinese internet right now as social media users compare (in Chinese, or see English report) the recent movements of two people who tested positive for COVID in the capital and who had to report their daily doings for contact tracing purposes. One was a migrant who spent most of his waking hours working, the other an urbanite who frequented luxury malls.

China has produced only “two cultural works over the last four decades…that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the [science fiction series] Three-Body Problem and TikTok,” said technology analyst Dan Wang in his annual letter at the end of 2021. (Dan is the guest on the latest Sinica Podcast, where he talks about his letter.)

Could the next one be the game Genshin Impact, a video game that has won the “game of the year” award on both Apple and Google Play, and — in its first year — become the fourth-highest-grossing game worldwide, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. Click through to The China Project for our feature on the game and the company behind it, by Chang Che.

Our word of the day is United States Department of Justice (美国司法部 měiguó sīfǎ bù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief