Editor’s note for Tuesday, November 23, 2021

My thoughts today:

On November 9, a Chinese graduate student in Chicago was shot and killed in a robbery, apparently over a cellphone “that was later sold for $100.” The student’s name is Dennis Zheng (郑少雄 Zhèng Shǎoxióng).

“Some University of Chicago students and community groups gathered on campus Monday to decry the university’s immediate plans to improve safety in the aftermath of the killing of a Chinese alum earlier this month,” reports WBEZ. “The groups also denounced an increase of anti-Black sentiment on campus in the wake of the killing.”

This came after a student rally last week “intended to express grief and fear — was co-opted by some attendees to ‘pit Asians against Black people in the community.’”

This may be a somewhat sensitive story on U.S. campuses that has pitted some self-perceived progressives against each other, but it’s not being treated as sensitive at all by China’s censors: Reports and social media posts about Zheng’s murder are all over the Chinese internet.

Tennis player Péng Shuài 彭帅, however, remains a non-person on the Chinese internet at the same time that Beijing continues to assure the outside world that she is fine. As the New York Times’s Li Yuan writes: “Accustomed to forcing messages on audiences at home and abroad, its propaganda machine hasn’t learned how to craft a narrative that stands up to scrutiny.”

Upcoming events:

• November 30: Meet the millennial entrepreneurs driving U.S.-China green business.
• December 15: Beyond Shang-Chi: Superheroes, masculinity, and Asian American representation.

Our word of the day is Democratic Progressive Party (民主進步黨 mínzhǔ jìnbù dǎng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief