Editor’s Note for Thursday, August 4, 2022
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
Friends with gold bars, and friends behind bars: If you live in China long enough, you will have at least one friend or acquaintance who becomes unimaginably rich, and at least one who gets locked up in jail. (Sometimes those two friends are the same person.)
Our top story today is about someone who is both extremely loaded and a former jailbird: The founder of the GOME appliance retail empire, Huáng Guāngyù 黄光裕. He’s not my friend, but I do have a second degree relationship with him because of his time in a Beijing jail.
The Pelosi Palooza continues today, as China unleashes sound and fury on the seas around Taiwan in response to the visit of the United States House Speaker. In today’s newsletter, we have coverage of the missiles and ships and planes in the East China Sea right now. On the same subject, you can also:
- Watch Lizzi Lee’s video interview with David Sacks of the Council on Foreign Relations, and her earlier interview with Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund.
- Listen to a Sinica Podcast interview with John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years.
Our word of the day is appliance retailer Gome (国美 guóměi).
—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief
