Know Both Sides

@KaiserKuo @AngelicaOung >trained journalists trained to be deeply biased is even worse than untrained eye cuz untrained eye doesn't distort reality

It took five years for any noticeable uptick, which only began in 2025. And it went way up from way, way down. Perception improved because of China's irrefutable prowess in green tech and esp. EVs, because of DeepSeek, the TikTok refugee phenom, some YT influencers going to China, humanoid robotics, infrastructure porn. All great. But none of these stories was missed by the U.S. media, either. I simply don't buy the idea that tourists and IG influencers do the same job as trained journalists, for all their flaws. I'm glad they're in China, and it broadens the picture, but if I want a medical diagnosis on a lump I want an MRI, ultrasound, X-rays etc — not just my neighbor's untrained eye.

Well well WELL well well…a little bird told me today that China is actually anxious to get MORE foreign reporters back in lately and temporary reporting visas are easier to obtain than you’d expect. How to square that with the fact that they’ve been going on an absolute jamboree of kicking out long-time correspondents? Most recently, the New York Times’ @vwang3 was not given a fresh visa. I know second-hand the pain of a reporter kept out from China…that’s where the story is. Taiwan just isn’t the same. But I also know the avid instinct for the “China Bad” story that can lead them to miss the real story about China even if they are on the ground. I think this is a question China has to sort out. Does it still crave the recognition of a positive story in the NYT or WSJ? Then keeping longtime correspondents out is fruitless. But if it is content with Internet aura nevermind the paper of record, then sure just let more tourists in Visa Free.

@AngelicaOung If by "foreign reporters", that little bird means reporters from western MSM, I have the Big Bird to sell him

@JakeDodge17 @AngelicaOung Real leaders don't talk, they just do things. You only know the showmanship of your leaders cuz you guys are so shallow

@AngelicaOung Eagerly waiting for a one-hour, no-holds-barred Xi Jinping press conference, or a one-on-one with Wang Huning and his famed views on America's race problems. Chinese leaders hide and hide, but no one calls them to account for their evasiveness.

@vk_sterling @AngelicaOung Nah, these journos don't do objective reporting, but smearing China w/ deep bias and cherry picking. China doesn't owe them to suck it all up

I think the CCP is deeply insecure about showing the country’s flaws and problems. It works overtime to project an image of perfection that simply doesn’t exist. The propaganda is so forced that it’s often easy to see right through it. If the government is so confident in its narrative, then let journalists travel freely through Xinjiang. Let them interview people without restrictions. If the accusations are false, the truth will speak for itself. If some of them are true, then have the courage to admit it and defend the policy openly. Brazil’s largest TV network recently sent a permanent reporting team to China for the first time. During their first week, a sinkhole opened up in a city street. When they tried to film the scene, local police stopped them. They ended up having to record footage discreetly. That’s not normal. It reflects a leadership that is uncomfortable with transparency and afraid of showing the country as it really is. The CCP hasn’t really been a communist party since Deng Xiaoping, yet it still seems afraid to change its name or formally abandon an ideology it no longer follows in practice. A government that is confident in itself doesn’t fear scrutiny. A government that constantly restricts what people can see usually does.

@AngelicaOung @Philip386287161 But they really don't care abt the real story, are only interested in digging up something to be packaged as dirty laundry

@Philip386287161 Oh they all want to go back…it’s where the story is

@KaiserKuo @AngelicaOung No, they're not brave cuz they know that China only expels them at most, won't put them in jail. If they can use their energy to expose every detail of Israel's influence in every corner of US politics, then I'll call them brave

Here's an excerpt from a talk I gave a few years ago on the complexity: ___ A second precept or maxim I think we should all take up is that we should strive to understand the optical properties of the lens – the lens through which so very much of the information we get about China ultimately filters. What I mean, mainly, is the media – though this is true to some degree in the academic research and the analysis we read as well. Let’s focus for now, though, on the media, because it serves as the nearly exclusive source of knowledge for anyone who isn’t a specialist in China, either studying the language, or the politics, or the history, or the economics or what have you currently at a college or university, or working in a field related to China. Even specialists depend on the media for a huge amount of their intake concerning China. I believe there is much to be admired in most of the journalists who’ve shaped the American understanding of contemporary China. On balance, they are idealistic and principled individuals. They didn’t go into journalism to get rich. They are, by and large, dedicated to bringing truth to light and to fact-based reporting. They are, if I may generalize, more skeptical than average people. They even lean toward cynicism, despite their idealism. As idealists, many of them have a streak of activism, too: Their instinctive sympathies are with the oppressed, the downtrodden, the marginalized. They root for the underdog. They’ve “followed the money” and pulled off tremendous feats of forensic accounting. They’re resourceful and persistent. They’re admirably brave: they work in the face of surveillance, harassment, the threat of detention or expulsion., I love that journalists have this adversarial approach when they’re reporting on things here in the U.S. You’ll hear variations on a quote, often attributed if incorrectly to George Orwell: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” Journalists in the Anglophone West at least have an idea of themselves as speaking truth to power, of ferreting out misdeeds by the mighty, whether in government or in business. I’ve certainly cheered on our journalists in the last couple of years as they’ve bravely faced an administration that’s always screaming “fake news” and calling them the “enemy of the people.” Watching journalists boldly go after the uncountable instances of malfeasance and skullduggery in the present U.S. administration it’s hard, for someone like me at least, not to be genuinely impressed and even inspired. But even now when I open the paper and read a dozen, sometimes more, articles that by themselves would make me believe that the end is nigh and that America is basically in flames – about the shooting of innocent motorists, about suicides, about gun violence, about corruption and overdose deaths and hate speech – I still have the rest of the paper, about the more mundane things, even about some happy things. And more importantly, I have my own lived experience of the United States. I know that I’m going to come home and my wife will be pruning roses and my son will be playing Fortnite and my daughter will be enthusing about the latest release from the K-Pop band BTS. I know we’re going to go to Costco, and to grill, and watch Netflix. But when I as an average American who has never lived in China or studied it seriously in an academic setting sit down with my paper and read six or seven stories that touch on China, and most of them are negative, I simply don’t have that same context. There aren’t numerous other stories, less sensational and less stridently critical, to dilute down my impression; and of course I don’t have the lived experience of China. My impression, then, is going to be formed without that counterbalance. And the China that emerges is one formed of all these negative impressions. China becomes a place defined by political repression, a toxic environment, venal officials and a crass nouveau riche. Should the mission of foreign correspondence be changed, then? It’s a question others have asked, too – writers like Peter Hessler, who has had the luxury of writing in a space that allows him to unpack tons of context and introduce a living, organic picture. This is urgent, especially when writing about a country as different as China, a country where the historical context matters so very much, where the potential consequences of misunderstanding are so dire, I think that it must be. In an ideal world, foreign correspondence on China would be like Peter Hessler’s: it would be able to provide more context, fill in more relevant history, offer a broader perspective and remind readers of how far things have come. It would avoid imposing American ideological frames on issues and strive to convey, to the American reader, a better sense of what Chinese priorities are, and what the Chinese lived experience has been. Reporting by reputable Western media outlets may very well be accurate. But often it doesn’t quite add up to realistic. The stories don’t, in other words, convey a sense for what China is really like. I’m reminded of something that Jiayang Fan, a staff writer for The New Yorker once said. Speaking on a panel at the New Yorker Festival with other China correspondents for the magazine, she was asked what it’s like for her, as someone who was born in China and spent her childhood there, to read the reporting on China in western publications. She said that it reminds her of looking at an x-ray of a familiar body part – of her hand, say. The x-ray image of her hand is literally penetrating, and very accurate: all the bones, in their exact relation to one another, invisible to her naked eye. But for all its anatomical precision, the image just isn’t her hand. It doesn’t have the flesh, the muscle, the sinews and tendons and blood vessels that make it her own organic, living hand. Unfortunately, it’s unrealistic to expect that this will change. The constraints are too many. Keeping a reporter in the field is expensive, and in a time of tight budgets and struggling media outlets, growing bureaus – and having them in more cities around China – is not going to happen. Reporters aren’t going to suddenly start doubling or tripling their output. They will still, by the inexorable force of many structural factors, select stories that are not quotidian. They will keep writing about the bridge that collapsed, and not the thousands that didn’t. They’ll avoid the dog bites man story, choosing instead the man bites dog. They will go to one of the precisely three types of China stories, as categorized by Jamil Anderlini, the bureau chief of the Financial Times: Big China, Bad China, and Weird China. Alas, most of us decide what outlets we like and what reporters we trust based not on the assiduousness with which they report, or their ability to succinctly provide relevant context, but rather it’s based for most of us on whether their reporting confirms our preexisting biases and beliefs. This is very hard to get over. And as those pre-existing biases become part of our mental furniture, as these narratives harden, it becomes even harder to change them. So let’s understand that there will be bias in the reporting you read on China. That doesn’t mean that there’s some coordinated campaign to smear China. We’re talking about a relatively small number of individuals with an outsize ability to shape our views on this massive nation of 1.4 billion people. Together they form a kind of lens through which we view China, and we simply have to take some time to think about the way that this lens tends to distort and diffract the light passing through it. Sometimes it’s not structural, and the bias is more straight-up: Using words that have become unquestionably pejorative, like regime used to describe a government (we only use it for governments we don’t like, thus one never hears about the Trudeau regime, the Macron regime, the Abe regime) – but the Maduro regime, the Putin regime, the Xi Jinping regime. Watch out also for this tendency to treat China as some kind of monolith, but keep in mind – even when you find glaring instances of this – that Beijing also deliberately projects an image of China as monolithic, and be forgiving. Still, let’s hold our own media to a higher standard: When a local government enacts some bad law, let’s call it out when the report says “China” enacted that law. Imagine, as you often should, what it would look like in reverse: What would it look like if a school district in Arkansas bans the teaching of evolution in public schools, say, and you read a headline that said, “U.S. bans teaching of evolution.”

@KaiserKuo @AngelicaOung Even if no coordinated campaign, such deep bias is baked into their reporting, no hope of change. You as an American can forgive them as "it's just life", but why should China? What does China owe them to have to suck up? "good riddance" is the most rational reaction from Chinese

@Forrestening @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung Bush started the Iraq War. Trump started the Iran War. What a twin. LMAO

@KnowBothSides @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung Trump and bush have almost nothing in common, other than party affiliation.

To save Taiwan, the best way is to work with and not against the mainland. Nothing needs to be lost except our utility as a foreign policy tool for America.

@Forrestening @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung Nah, You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Tell me abt any meaningful changes.

@KnowBothSides @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung I’ll repeat: parties change and adapt, it’s called COMPETITION, something which is alien to you.

@Forrestening @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung What a childish lie:x.com/i/grok/share/c…

@KnowBothSides @ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung Negative campaigning is mainly a tactic of the left. The right runs on positive policies.

@Forrestening @AngelicaOung If this was true, everyone gets promoted? You don't even realize that it sounds too good to be true? Use your brain, even tho it's not that smart

@KnowBothSides @AngelicaOung “Concrete metrics”, lmao. Local magistrates in China are famous for fudging numbers to make themselves look good.

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung Democracy means "getting out of the way" cuz they're not communism. By your logic, "getting out of the way" is all they need to get high growth just like China

@AngelicaOung @KnowBothSides Democracy just means you get to choose your leaders who put forward a strategy you agree on. But that’s limited to the competence of the elected leader and, frankly, the collective wisdom of the electorate, like it or not. It’s not a guarantee of success. Which system is?

Btw in 1995 Taiwan was about 2 percent of Chinas population but 40% of its GDP. Today Taiwan is still about 2% of the mainlands population but GDP is only about 5%. Taiwan did not stay stagnant. Our GDP roughly tripled since 1995. Rather it’s China’s robust and sustained economic expansion that is unprecedented. Despite this, not a single Nobel Prize has been awarded to a Chinese economist.

@ValuSeeker20 @AngelicaOung @Man_Decentral How abt most of the democracies in the world, which are poor?

@AngelicaOung @Man_Decentral Yeah, they learned a thing or two after starving their own people a couple times due to stupid policies like Great Leap Forward.

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung

@KnowBothSides @AngelicaOung Well, democracies are also far wealthier and far earlier than China is today. China today is powerful by scale, not by capita.

@polijunkie_aus @AngelicaOung China doesn't limit them from going to rural towns. This is confidence enough. Many tourists and influencers did go to rural towns

@AngelicaOung The problem is Angelica, tourists only go to where tourists go. Do you think tourists visit America to see the opioid-infested rural towns or the Statue of Liberty?

The problem is Nick, in the aggregate the international perception of China only improved as they kicked the western journalists out. Instead, China opened its doors to tourists who came an saw the country for themselves Visa Free. All of a sudden the world got China-fever. I’m all for a free press. But shouldn’t the press reflect on how they’re coming up with one China-bad story after another while everybody who just goes there is speaking of progress, excitement and indeed transformation? Let me be clear: I don’t like China’s restrictions on speech. But at the same time what I like even less is how the west turns speech into a weapon. Is the problem that China lacks confidence? Maybe 40 percent. But the 60% is the western journalists (in the aggregate I don’t know the work of this particular reporter) being biased and slanderous.

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung Did I say China is the richest country? What's even your point? Moving goalpost or building strawman? I'm only talking abt how ridiculous your "only getting out of the way" is

@KnowBothSides @AngelicaOung Compared to every single one of its East Asian peers, adjusted for population, China remains a middle income country at best. Amongst Chinese majority nations or territories, it also remains the poorest by a long margin. So what point did I not address here?

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung Only those a few rich democracies, who were already rich enough before they became democracy

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung I dgaf abt any non-STEM Nobel prize. My point is "only getting out of the way" is ridiculous oversimplification

@KnowBothSides @AngelicaOung So what innovation, exactly, was promoted here by the Chinese leadership or economists, to deserve a Nobel prize? What ground breaking achievement did they do here?

@GibberCapital @AngelicaOung Oversimplification. If it were as easy as only getting out of the way, every poor democracy would have already been rich long before China

@KnowBothSides @AngelicaOung The primary purpose of reform and opening up was exactly to get out of the way. That’s why SEZs were created. Special zones where the state would do exactly that, get out of the way, so businesses can thrive. Today look at them. Is there any doubt it worked?

@ValuSeeker20 @Forrestening @AngelicaOung Nah, same party, so Clinton and Obama have many common policies, so do Trump and Bush, tho not exactly the same. One thing is same - they're all incompetent short term amateurs

@KnowBothSides @Forrestening @AngelicaOung No, the party changes all the time. Just because their names stay the same do not mean their platforms are the same. Compare Bill Clinton's to Obama's. Or Trump's to Bush's.