Editor’s note for Wednesday, May 12, 2021

My thoughts today:

We quote from Twitter liberally in this newsletter: Love it or hate it, tweets are where news breaks, and where many of the world’s leading thinkers on any subject you care to name express themselves concisely. (This is not a recommendation for you to use Twitter yourself: We read all the China tweets so you don’t have to!)

Twitter is also a key vector for the spread of political messaging and propaganda, and the Chinese government has been using it for some time — see our piece last year: Diplomats and trolling operations: How China uses social media to sell its narrative.

A new report from the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that much of the noise generated by Chinese state voices on Twitter comes from an “army of fake accounts” that retweet Chinese diplomats. Read the report here or see this Associated Press summary for details.

Our word of the day is Xiaomi, the phone and soon-to-be electric car company (小米 xiǎomǐ) — which literally means “millet,” although some say the phone brand’s name is better translated as “little rice.”

See this Zhihu page (in Chinese) for more speculation on the origins of Xiaomi’s brand name.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief