It’s going to be a wild year — Editor’s Note for Friday, February 18, 2022

Dear reader,

The Year of The Tiger really begins next week: Lunar New year is truly over, Eileen Gu will go home to California, and the Olympics will be a memory.

And Vladimir Putin might invade Ukraine, according to many smart people with expertise and connections in Moscow and Kyiv. Others vigorously deny it: Chinese state media workers on Twitter and their supporters have been making memes about American journalist and pundit predictions and comments about an immediate invasion.

One joke came from Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who said, in remarks amplified by Russian state media agency Tass:

I’d like to request U.S. and British disinformation: Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Sun media outlets to publish the schedule for our upcoming invasions for the year. I’d like to plan my vacation.

Russian officials have a good sense of humor. Putin himself, for example, in 2017 denied reports that he had kompromat on Donald Trump by saying that the then U.S. president was “a grown man [who] has met the most beautiful women in the world.” The punchline:

I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.

Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock today said that if Russia violates international law by invading Ukraine and China looks the other way, Germany “cannot have normal relations” with Beijing, per Noah Barkin of the Rhodium Group.

So, while I am not going to repeat my mistake in our 2022 Red Paper of predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine, I will say that the rest of this year is bound to be a wild ride.

In that spirit, and also because we hope to delight you, dear reader, we have redesigned our Friday newsletter to try to bring you the news about China you really need, and the best of everything we’ve produced this week.

Please let me know what you think, by replying to this email, or reach all of our editors by writing to editors@thechinaproject.com.

Our phrase of the week is: They don’t cry until they see the coffin (不见棺材不落泪 bùjiàn guāncai bù luò lèi). This phrase has been buzzing on Chinese social media after yet another overworked employee died at a tech firm.

Click through to The China Project for a detailed explanation and links to the news behind the language.