Richard Chen

I’ll stick my neck out a little here and make a call Barring major injuries, Reed Sheppard will make an all star team before his second contract ends

Every Republican who ever said anything against the JCPOA, myself included, looks very silly today.

Grasping the sheer scale and intensity of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) - history’s largest and last pre-industrial war - is so hard. ​The best analogy I can come up with: ​Imagine if Mormon prophet Joseph Smith had stayed on the Erie Canal. His followers, armed mostly with spears and swords, rise up and capture the entire US Midwest, seizing the nation's agricultural breadbasket. They systematically slaughter anyone from New York City and starve out huge towns like Chicago. The war kills 5% to 7.5% of the population, double the actual US Civil War. ​Then, right as the Federal government completely collapses, the British Empire sails steam-powered gunboats up the Hudson River. They arm a ruthless mercenary force with state-of-the-art rifles to crush the uprising: not to save the US, but to keep Wall Street and the Atlantic trade routes open. ​Meanwhile, in a completely separate conflict(!), official British and French armies sail up the Potomac and loot and burn the Smithsonian, the Capitol and Mount Vernon. ​The Taiping Rebellion killed 20 to 30 million people, more than WW1. It was World War China.

Extraordinary how much of the US commentariat doesn't understand that you have to take a "bad deal" after you lose a war

What if we just see the document? It’s a short diplomatic agreement that has been signed. It’s weird that it’s not available.

Men who use ipads with a goofy little keyboard instead of a laptop are weak and easily dominated

@RadioFreeTom Tom, he's convinced me you're right wing Nazi scum like.... Hasan Piker and Mamdani.

Le Chaton Fat 🤝 Chinese caste theory Nonsense cluttering up my FYP today

@joequant That said, China consumption numbers being under estimate due to the deflation is real

There has always been a gap between Western coverage of the Chinese economy and what is happening on the ground as I am seeing it, but it's never been this bad. It's not just a China thing, the gap between the financial press and the daily lives of ordinary people seems unreal.

@joequant I can’t say I am working in China, but certainly close enough and it does seem at least there are serious under employment crisis in the mainland, and rumors of severe delays in payments and salaries in construction

things i’ve learned from going back and forth to China: - a lot (most) new cars on the U.S. market are actually really fucking awful

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

(One thing you’ll almost never see from a Chinese parent handwringing like this is lateral thinking about how to prepare their kids for life if they’re not stellar at academics, because they default assume a decent life is impossible without an ideal academic progression).

The reality was that even had Chiang won the Civil War, China would have looked much the same in our timeline except with a different flag and the US would be just as hostile towards a KMT China as a communist one. Any American who believes otherwise is just wishcasting his desires and not based in reality.

they lost two games to cj mccollum and one to donald trump. we’ll never see a run like this ever again.

The BBC mournfully notes that only 30% of Brits now trust the news, the day after it told us Russia hired a couple of young Ukrainian male prostitutes to torch the PM's motor.

Any update?

New today: Peter Thiel's secret society of illuminati had a website so insecure it exposed his entire membership list. And it's... interesting. His Palatantir folks, sure. Leonard Leo. The president of Stanford. Ezra Klein. And some D politicians who really shouldn't be there. 1/

Yeah we don't need a declaration of war to bomb Iran but suddenly we need senate ratification of a treaty to make peace with Iran. Ok

@Henry_George63 @AngelicaOung By 1945, almost all the northern warlords have lost their original home base and thus their capcity to really be an independent actor, only the Guangxi guys still had some degree of autonomy, this is also why Warlord were no longer a problem at all after 1949

@RollingWave0720 @AngelicaOung Yeah weakening warlords was a big part of the Northern Expedition

This is a great question. I’ll answer it to the best of my ability, but I will inevitably come up short. I’d love to hear from as many ppl as possible. Please state your reasoning, not just your conclusion. TL;dr: Fascism with Chinese characteristics First thing to remember is that China had already fallen into warlordism by the time Chiang and Mao. Chiang was a strongman. But his coalition, the source of his power, was a collection of strongmen, each with regional support that would be hard to break. Assuming the ROC sticks together, I don’t think it could have become one big Singapore. I think a likelier possibility was a big Philippines. But worse. A lot of what Chiang did in Taiwan were logical moves: land reform, making everyone speak one dialect. He only had the capacity to put them in practice, however, because he was the big fish in the small pond. It’s one thing to dispossess colonial-era landowners and give free land to their serfs. It’s another to go to Ma Bufang in Qinghai and say « ok for the good of the country we need you to disband your private army and give up your land now. » Forget about Hui Muslim warlords. His own officer corp would have revolted if he proposed taking away ancestral lands. And so China’s greatest problem, staggering inequality, would have remained unresolved. But let’s just say he did. Somehow. He eliminated alllll his rivals and got a big blank slate China, what would he have done with it? Something surprisingly close to what the CPC is doing today, but with more dynastic flare probably. He would do land reform (many previous dynasties did that) he would empower technocrats (he did that in Taiwan) he would infrastructure-maxx because of course he’s Chinese. He would super duper wipe out the regional identities and hold on by hook or crook to Xinjiang and Tibet. And of course he would do Confucianism. Like on day one. He is a neo-confucianist. Serious one. I think China would have gotten rich faster and the contradictions in the west would be even more extreme than it is today. It would be fascism with Chinese characteristics not communism with Chinese characteristics.