I’ve recently been reading a book about the Ritz Hotel in Paris during World War II. It hinted that Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway might have slept together. Is this true?
532 karma · joined February 14, 2015
<River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze> -> one of my fav all the time. a forigner teach in this small chinese city, and he write what he observes.
for more ancient chinese history:
<1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline> -> one of the most popular china's history book for these years. highly recommnded.
i read a lot but i doubt many of them has a non-chinese version. the above ones are the ones i can think of now.
also <The Search for Modern China> is highly recommmend, but i foget if i have read it or not.
oh also another book on how chinese characters are made, 《China: Empire of Living Symbols》。 writen by a Sweden author Cecilia Lindqvist. i love it very much
Before Trump, people still believe USA is a great country even with so many flaws. Its still has a good reputation.Trump changed everything. He is not a bad leader, he has thoughts, but he cannot implement them with caution. And he destroyed USA's reputation, maybe forever.
Its hard to imaginy the greatest democracy' country, the president is manipulate the stock market, publicly, humiliating his friends country, or vaseel state. When the pro-USA people in china talks how great the USA is and China shoud learn from it, the comments is no longer agree anymore, most of them are mocking.and thats what the younger generation will grow up with, the mindset is: yes china is not perfect, but its way better than the shit countries like USA.
You can see the change in the numbers of graduates return to china after college, its used to be low, not its near or >90%.
Tree-sitter grammar for `go' is missing; install it? y
Cloning repository
Compiling library
Library installed to /Users/xxx/.emacs.d/tree-sitter/libtree-sitter-go.dylib
looks pretty good.
+1 reason not to travel to USA
even it cost more, but still better thant the current situation?
Take the incident mentioned in the piece: the Xi'an Culture and Tourism Bureau later clarified that no one had actually made such phone calls. The reporter simply cited an unverified online comment without doing any fact-checking.
This is a classic tactic used to smear an opponent—exaggerating their views to an absurd degree to weaponize public disgust against them. In reality, aside from this fabricated "phone call" incident, conspiracy theories claiming the Tang dynasty didn't exist have never received any attention from mainstream media or the general public in China.
Its real-world impact is virtually zero. Following this bizarre logic, the author would be better off reporting on how praise for German Nazism spreads on Chinese social media(but i know CNN dont have the balls).
this tv show ( meet youself, cast by Liu yifei, who also played Mulan(2020)) has a short part is about the 'tiny people': https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww
its very safe and the prices are cheap. The only downside is that public toilets are scarce and they all charge a fee, which is really hard to deal with as a Chinese person. I was shocked that the price of using a restroom often exceeded the price of a loaf of naan
also this reminds me to refresh my personal blog domain and keep writing blogs.. because i have no where to post travel blogs like this for now.
Is China an authoritarian government? I’d say yes. Is an authoritarian government worse than a democratic one? Personally, I think so. But these discussions always happen within a perfect, idealized model—reality looks a lot different. Take Japan and South Korea, for instance. Are they democracies? Sure. But Japan is heavily driven by factional and dynastic politics, meaning most lawmakers come from established political families, and regular citizens don't really stand a chance of breaking into that circle. In a recent asset disclosure in Japan, many politicians literally wrote down "$0," and I honestly can't think of a government so broken that even the voters don't see a massive issue with that. Meanwhile, South Korea has its chaebol politics, where massive conglomerates wield incredible influence over the government, to the point where most South Korean presidents end up in prison or meet an untimely end.
Coming back to the US vs. China dynamic: in reality, China’s authoritarian system is actually way more logical and resilient than it sounds from the outside. While openly criticizing Communist Party policies is pretty much banned domestically, the public can still shape the decisions of the government and the Party through public opinion. It ties back to that famous quote: "In China, you can’t change the party, but you can change the policy; in the US, you can change the party, but you can’t change the policy." Even if some policy changes in China happen slowly, compared to the US, it actually works out a lot better most of the time.
As for the article mentioning the use of AI for cyber and biological attacks—they know full well that the US has already deployed AI in actual warfare, which is exactly why they conveniently dodged that topic. It’s incredibly hypocritical. Ironically, the one that hasn't actually engaged in that kind of behavior is the "authoritarian" Chinese government. Sure, you could speculate that China might use AI weapons against Taiwan down the road—especially considering Taiwan likes to build fortifications near schools to create leverage against the PLA—but launching a moral crusade over something that hasn't even happened, coming from American companies whose own country has already done these exact things, is just plain shameless.
Another common misconception is trying to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people, with arguments like: "The Chinese people are oppressed, so you have to look at them separately; the government is evil, but the people aren't." You only need to look at the US to see the flaw in that logic. The American public voted Trump into office, letting him trigger trade wars and attack other nations. Does that make the American people evil? If the answer is no, then it implies the US isn't truly a democracy, since only an authoritarian state could completely ignore its people's wishes and do whatever it wants. If the answer is yes, then the US really is a democracy—it's just made up of malicious people, much like the company that put out this article.
i have one good example: the rare earth probelm. i saw many artices on this topic in reddit/x, and many times, it comes with a pic of an old farmer/dude in a dirty environment doing it's work. so it implies this is just a dirty work, western countires dont want to do it is because it's dirty and they dont want to harm the environment. only china dont care about this,
exmaple link: 1. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-china-rare-earths-d... 2. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2026/07/16/...
but in reality, its not true. its only true long time before, assume china didn't have advanced tech on this is totally insane, consider china has joined this indsutry for decaseds and lead in the tech. but in most comments area, people still assume it's dirty so only china is doing it.
if you dont know your 'enermy', you will keep lose. This happens so many times.
Its author is Liu Cixin, whose other work The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award and was adapted into a TV series by Netflix. His thinking carries a heavy shadow of Mao Zedong's strategic philosophy. This novella is very intriguing—it is set during a time in the past when the gap between China and the US was immense, and people were trying to imagine how China could win if a war broke out. I forgot the exact details, but the general concept is to force a technological regression through electronic warfare, knocking out all smart devices. By doing this, both China and the US are dragged down to the exact same technological baseline, allowing China to win the war.
Similarly, when facing the nuclear threat from the former Soviet Union, Mao’s idea was to abandon Chinese territory and launch a counter-offensive directly into Soviet land instead. Their underlying logic is similar: if the gap between us is too vast, we don't follow the traditional route of trying to catch up; instead, we find a way to drag your absolute advantage down to our level.
He has written many novels, and I can say with full responsibility that they are incredibly revealing when it comes to understanding the behavior and mindset of the Chinese people.