Picturemania 🇺🇦🇹🇼 @IstanbulEric

Sharing this analysis by Taipei Forum Foundation President Su Hungdah on KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s travels and her challenge to secure the dual confidence of the Taiwan electorate and the US in order to preserve KMT leverage with Beijing. brookings.edu/articles/the-c…

Good piece: So many young Chinese have quietly asked me what happened at Tiananmen, knowing that I was there but not quite sure what the "6-4 incident" entailed. As Lu Xun wrote a century ago: "Facts written in blood cannot be erased by lies written in ink."

Michelle Ye Hee Lee @myhlee

5 days ago

How young Chinese are learning the truth about Tiananmen Square, despite censorship. Important read from @huiiiiiyee (gift link): wapo.st/4ad2UeF

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In a sign of Xi Jinping's insecurities, China has expelled an outstanding New York Times correspondent, Vivian Wang, who for years has done tremendous work covering that country. The Times, which has covered China since the 1850s and once had about a dozen correspondents in China, now has just one -- because of visa restrictions. China is a major international power, but it displays a remarkable lack of self-confidence when it bars correspondents like this. It will still be covered but from places like Taiwan in ways that can't do it justice. China has some extraordinary accomplishments in science, in education, in health, in infrastructure; a baby born in Beijing today has a longer life expectancy than a baby born in Washington DC. Yet China fears international coverage in a way that I think reflects a political immaturity and hurts itself. 搬起石头砸自己的脚. nytimes.com/2026/05/29/us/…

I broke down crying on live CBS television. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. Because it was the 4th time that I sat in a courtroom watching actual assassins, convicted murderers sent by the Islamic Republic to kill me, face charges on American soil. You’d think that feels like winning. Unfortunately , it doesn’t. Because all I could think about was them. The same killers back home in Iran, The innocent people facing the exact same murderers, the same regime, the same orders, the same hands, with no courtroom. No lawyer. No protection. Just a rope at dawn and a family forbidden from crying at their grave. In America, they get arrested. In Iran, the same murderers are hanging my protesters killing women and children. I survived. I am supposed to feel grateful. But how do you feel grateful when the same machine that came for you is still running, and your family back home are still dying? This is called survivor guilt. And it doesn’t leave me….. 💔

Michel Ouaknine, membre de l’Union juive française pour la paix (UJFP), estime que « aucun Juif des pays arabes et musulmans n’a été déporté pendant la Shoah » et dénonce l’amalgame entre antisionisme et antisémitisme dans le débat public français Dans un entretien accordé à Anadolu, il critique également le soutien occidental à Israël et les poursuites visant certains militants pro-palestiniens v.aa.com.tr/3951012

Beijing's pattern is clear: silence independent reporting, control the narrative. But here's the irony-kicking out American journalists doesn't make China look strong. It makes it look afraid. nytimes.com/2026/05/29/us/…

Very interesting. Very difficult actually to imagine that Citizen Kane's visual style came just out of Welles' creativity

DepressedBergman @DannyDrinksWine

2 weeks ago

Pauline Kael on how Gregg Toland's work in Karl Freund's "Mad Love" (1935) influenced Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941): "I had always been puzzled by the fact that Kane seemed to draw not only on the Expressionist theatrical style of Welles’s stage productions but on the

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Very good Rhodium piece on the challenges facing the Chinese economy. The good news, Rhodium notes, is that there is pretty much a consensus among economic policy advisors (although, I would add, not necessarily among policymakers) on the urgent need to rebalance the economy away from investment and towards consumption. The bad news is that there is no consensus on how the costs of this rebalancing are to be allocated within the economy – nor, I would also add, even an acknowledgement that this is the key issue in rebalancing. With, broadly speaking, three sectors in the economy, the transfers needed to raise consumption must be allocated either within the household sector or from the business or government sectors. In the first case, the transfers would come from rich and middle class households (e.g. through higher income taxes, property taxes, or cuts in services) and go to migrant workers and the rural poor. But with the middle class already suffering from job uncertainty and the property decline, this might be socially and politically more disruptive than Beijing would want to consider. What is more, the main reason for low consumption in China is not income inequality within households but rather the low overall household share of income, so even if Beijing were willing to implement such policies, they wouldn't solve the deeper underlying problem. Another way to raise the consumption share involves transfers from businesses to households (e.g. raise interest rates, revalue the currency, reduce subsidies to businesses, close down the weakest players in sectors with low profitability and excess capacity, cut spending on logistical infrastructure). The problem here is that after years of operating on massive direct and indirect subsidies, many Chinese manufacturers are incredibly competitive but not terrible efficient (in the sense of being able to create more economic value than they absorb directly and indirectly through subsidies and transfers). Without these transfers, in other words, an awful lot of businesses would be forced either to cut capacity sharply or to close. If this were to happen quickly, it would be very disruptive for employment and the overall economy, but if this were to happen over at least a decade or more of careful restructuring, it would require a lot more foreign forbearance on trade and a lot more debt. The third way to raise the consumption share of GDP is to allocate the costs to the central or local governments. The right way to do this, as Rhodium notes, might involve directly or indirectly transferring ownership of businesses and assets from local governments to households. The wrong way to do this would be to increase China's debt burden even further. Unfortunately even though China has the second highest debt burden in the world (after Japan's) and the fastest-growing debt burden in history, increasing debt further would be politically easier in the short term than transferring government assets to households. The key point here is that local governments should not liquidate assets to fund additional spending, as they seem to be doing now, but rather either to pay down debt or to fund transfers to households. But this almost certainly involves a significant change in the distribution of income within China and, with it, a potentially disruptive redistribution of power. So if it is so hard to rebalance, why not ignore rebalancing and just double down on the existing model? The problem here is that while certain aspects of the Chinese economy may seem in good shape, in fact the overall economy is struggling, and it is only massive increases in debt every year that allow Beijing to continue to achieve its growth targets. But as happened to every other country that followed this model, debt is always what causes the ultimate unraveling, and it is much better for China to begin the difficult adjustment while it still has fiscal space than to be forced into adjustment when it no longer has fiscal space.

Rhodium Group @rhodium_group

2 weeks ago

New reforms to China's hukou system will certainly benefit migrant workers by giving them access to more social services where they live and work. But without other changes, it may not reduce cautionary savings and boost consumption significantly. rhg.com/research/how-c…

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Au lieu d’écouter les élucubrations sionistes d’Arthur et son négationnisme du génocide, écoutez plutôt Michel Feher , c’est pas le même niveau !!

Affligeant

Antoine Bondaz @AntoineBondaz

4 weeks ago

Le niveau… 🙄

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Un peu excessif dans la formulation, mais belle analyse iconographique

C'est du bon sens, non ? Amplement attesté par les exemples dans l'histoire du cinéma.

Variety @Variety

4 weeks ago

#Cannes jury president Park Chan-wook says "I don’t think politics and art should be divided." " I think it’s a strange concept to think that they’re in conflict with each other. Just because a work of art has a political statement, it should not be considered an enemy of art.

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1/2 BBC: "In a letter to Spaniards posted on social media, Sánchez said the mass legalisation sought "to acknowledge the reality of nearly half a million people who already form part of our everyday lives"." bbc.com/news/articles/…

Trump administration is taking money Europeans and others have paid for arms for Ukraine and other purposes, not delivering said arms, and spending cash to help with self-created Gulf mess. This is not a trustworthy power. Credibility incinerated.

Discussion avec Trump dans une rencontre datant de 2019. Carter est mort en 2024. C'est encore pertinent aujourd'hui

Kateri Seraphina @KateriSeraphina

3 months ago

« Tu crains que la Chine ne nous devance, et je suis d’accord avec toi. Mais sais-tu pourquoi la Chine nous devance ? J’ai normalisé les relations diplomatiques avec Pékin en 1979. Depuis cette date, sais-tu combien de fois la Chine est entrée en guerre contre quelqu’un ? — Pas

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Ha ha 🤭

Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman

3 months ago

If the US is asking European and Asian allies to send their navies to the Strait of Hormuz, they should consider demanding an immediate cessation of all US tariffs on them in return. I don't think Trump would hesitate to make that demand, if the situations were reversed.

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Le nombre d'avis convergents sur la politique étrangère des Etats Unis est inouï

Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs

3 months ago

In the long run, Trump’s foreign policy strategy will leave the United States “poorer, less secure, and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes,” writes Stephen Walt. foreignaffairs.com/united-states/…

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Les six films de Kinuyo Tanaka sont désormais en ligne sur Arte

Karine M. Donelle @KarineMDonelle

3 months ago

Excellente initiative d’Arte qui propose un cycle consacré à Kinuyo Tanaka, actrice de légende devenue réalisatrice tout aussi talentueuse. Ses six films sont dispos en version restaurée. Parmi ceux que j’ai vus je recommande vivement La nuit des femmes et Maternité éternelle.

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The US does not possess infinite political capital, bandwidth, military capacity or economic resilience. Every resource expended in Iran represents energy diverted from the true tectonic challenges defining the 21st century. My take:

Silence scandaleux dans les JT sur les exactions commises par des colons en Cisjordanie. meurtres, vols, le tout en présence de Tsahal, certains réservistes filmés participant à ce nettoyage ethnique.