Editor’s note for Tuesday, May 25, 2021

My thoughts today:

There was a huge drone conference in Shenzhen last weekend. Our business editor Chang Che attended and wrote up an overview of the booming industry — click through to The China Project to read it.

Who has benefited from the Gamestop affair, which saw thousands of American social media users and amateur traders bid up the price of an embattled U.S. game retailer and a cinema chain, with encouragement from Elon Musk?

Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that it was Wáng Jiànlín 王健林, the billionaire real estate developer who once had ambitions to recreate Hollywood in China but was humbled by debt and government displeasure. He’s clearly not out of the tycoon game: Thanks to Reddit’s traders, says the South China Morning Post, Wang turned his company Wanda’s stake in theater chain “AMC stake from a drain into a $675 million gain.”

Not having a great day at the movies however, is American pro wrestler and actor John Cena, whose rather cringeworthy apology to his Chinese fans for suggesting that Taiwan was a country is described in our second story below.

Like Cena, New Zealand has worked for years to cultivate the Chinese market. Recent events are justifiably giving it pause about its dependence on China for its exports. In December last year, Kiwi foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta rather naively offered to help broker a “peace deal”: between Australia and China.

But in an interview with the Guardian published yesterday, she said that “it may only be a matter of time before the storm gets closer to us…The signal I’m sending to exporters is that they need to think about diversification.”

Upcoming event: June 1: The U.S. Congress and economic relations with China.

Our word of the day is Fast and Furious 9 (玩命關頭9 wánmìng guāntóu jiǔ in Taiwan, 速度与激情九 sùdù yǔ jīqíng jiǔ in China).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief