Editor’s note for Tuesday, November 15, 2022

My thoughts today:

It’s not just Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon that are laying off thousands of staff: Chinese tech giant Tencent has begun a new round of layoffs. In August, Tencent reported its first quarterly drop in employee numbers in almost a decade.

It’s getting more and more difficult to get accurate information on protests and acts of dissent in China, as the numbers of foreign reporters in the country goes down and restrictions on local journalists and activists get stricter and stricter.

Here’s a tool that, if it works, will provide valuable data to scholars, journalists and even business people about acts of opposition against China: The China Dissent Monitor from Freedom House (see analysis of recent data here). Incidents documented in the last few months include street protests against a new school redistricting policy in Xi’an, home buyers protesting at a construction site in Chongqing, and online protests against COVID lockdowns.

Our word of the day is Anthony Albanese (安东尼•阿尔巴尼斯 āndōngní • ā’ěr bā nísī).