Editor’s note for Wednesday, November 9, 2022

My thoughts today:

Bào Tóng 鲍彤, a reform-minded senior Communist Party official who was purged and imprisoned in 1989 in connection with the protest movement, died at the age of 90 in Beijing today.

To get a sense of his thinking in his later years, read this 2020 interview with him — The Core will now dictate everything, or a commentary he wrote earlier this year: Follow the Party and prosper: oppose it and die.

Meanwhile China’s “World Internet Conference” kicked off today in the picturesque water town of Wuzhen on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Since the annual event began in 2014, China’s internet has become less and less connected to the rest of the world, so the name is a little like the World Series, an annual sporting event that includes only American baseball teams.

But the World Internet Conference usually does include a few luminaries from the American technology industry eager to ingratiate themselves with the Cyberspace Administration of China. This year was no exception: the CEOs of IBM, Intel, and Cisco all attended the conference virtually. American politicians, activists, and pundits may want decoupling, but most of the tech elite most certainly do not.

Our word of the day is: China’s special envoy on climate change (中国气候变化事务特使 zhōngguó qìhòu biànhuà shìwù tèshǐ).