Shiping Tang

Something quite interesting happened to us earlier today in Xinjiang. We were in a place called Jade Lake (玉湖, Yu Hu) and noticed on Xiaohongshu (the most popular social network on China) that a place nearby had recently gone viral for being super charming and looking like a small hobbit village (see screenshot of the XHS post 👇). So we decided to go check it out. However, before the entrance of the village we saw the road was blocked by a local villager: no-one could go through except locals. We asked why and sure enough it was because of the XHS post: the villagers didn't want their village suddenly turning into a tourist attraction. Which can take very dramatic proportions very fast in China: before you know it, literally tens of thousands of people could come to this village every day. The local villagers would be completely overwhelmed, and it could actually prove very dangerous. Chinese tourist spots are sometimes criticized for being highly managed: well imagine what happens when they're highly unmanaged... People can literally die. In any case we really wanted to see this particular spot so we asked that an exception be made, my wife even argued her case on the phone with the village leader (see video) but no luck 🤷‍♂️ So looks like, for the foreseeable future, all we'll know of this hobbit village in remote rural Xinjiang is that one Xiaohongshu post.

People in the comments have been asking me for videos of a local supermarket during my current roadtrip in Xinjiang, so here you go 👇 It's actually proven to be a very humbling experience: the abundance and diversity of products vastly exceeds anything you'd find in most supermarkets in the West, even in my native France. And we're not even in a big city: I'm at a local supermarket in a small remote town named 特克斯, only 50k inhabitants, which is super tiny by Chinese standards.

Tucker: "You couldn't stay in a hotel…because you criticized Israel?!" Waters: "Yes." Rock legend Roger Waters tells Tucker Carlson how he was banned from hotels in Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Colombia due to pressure from the Israel Lobby.

Watters: Women on base, you better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.

Just keep in mind, as I have said many times, you’ve got to assume Trump is lying unless proven otherwise. He’s obviously trying to produce an issue here that will allow him to manipulate the November midterm elections and also support his bogus claims of fraudulent elections in the past.

"...All of China’s major uses of force, from the Korean War (1950-1953) to the Sino-Indian War (1962) to the war with Vietnam (1979) witnessed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) deployed along China’s borders, implying that Beijing does indeed regard border regions as zones of special sensitivity. Taiwan is far and away the greatest flashpoint of concern. The island has always constituted the central point of friction in US-China relations going all the way back to dangerous crises in the 1950s. However, the dramatically shifting military balance of power in the western Pacific along with China’s rising nationalism has made the issue presently acute. The conflict is incredibly dangerous as it could witness a superpower clash of arms, even including the possibility of nuclear use. While scholars have previously proposed certain compromise solutions, such as the “Finlandization” of the island, it seems that SOI diplomacy along the lines of great power compromise is now what is urgently required. Chinese leaders will quite obviously refrain from publicly applying such frame- works to Taiwan, to be sure, since it is regarded as sovereign Chinese territory. Yet, thinking in conformity with a SOI framework may assist Washington in coming around to a final settlement. The island is hardly crucial to America’s defense in the Pacific, but it quite “organically” fits into China’s sphere of influ- ence for historical, cultural, and strategic reasons. US policies that recognize Taiwan’s existence within China’s sphere of influence could include giving substantive impetus to the “one China” policy, decreasing congressional visits to the island, lowering the frequency of Taiwan Strait transits by US warships, removing US troops from the island, and easing military deployments into proximate areas such as Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. Such steps, in accord with SOI realities in the western Pacific, could help ease Washington out of a set of commitments that long ago became obsolete and are now downright precarious. Thus, it is no surprise that Taiwan took on a very high profile at the recent Trump-Xi summit meeting in Beijing. To be sure, such accommodative measures by the United States should be met with Chinese gestures at compromise and de-escalation, as elaborated further below. The gains for both superpowers and for global stability of defusing the notorious Taiwan powder keg would not be small. A visit by Taiwan’s opposition leader Cheng Li-wun to Beijing in April 2026 gave impetus to those advocating for cross-Strait reconciliation. Taiwan is not a US treaty ally and US military forces, for the most part, were removed out of deference to Beijing’s sensitivities decades ago, so the above changes should not be too painful."

Richer countries tend to have a less favorable view of China. Poorer countries tend to have a more favorable view. True within regions as well. India and Singapore are the biggest outliers.

Is the US capital market its true superpower? Astonishing differences with China in top IPOs. The largest Chinese valuation was that for Ant Finance in 2025, but that didn't happen. Exceptional companies such as DeepSeek are valued at 1/15th of the price of US comparators .

This is so funny. I followed Luke's recommendation in the comments yesterday 👇 and went to this Russian bakery here in Yining, Xinjiang. And I met the man himself: Alexander, a Chinese Russian! He looks 100% Russian but speaks Chinese like a local. And he is, in fact, a local: we chatted a bit and he explained his family history - they've been here in Xinjiang for 6 generations! This is something people commonly don't know about: China recognizes 55 official ethnic minorities living in the country and Russians is one of them - there are quite a few Russians exactly like Alexander who look Russians in all respects but are Chinese. We saw many of them during our previous RV roadtrip in Dongbei on the border with Russia, it's more unexpected to meet one here in the middle of Xinjiang 😅

“Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits”. (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9, “Of the profits of stock”)

I love China Experts who can't get around China because they don't even have WeChat set up with payment systems Yet they say they know China. They can't even pay for a coffee or order a taxi I've seen many like this