Hat Yai Todd 🇨🇦 living in 🇹🇭

Immensely honored that on this historic day Guancha - one of China's most influential media outlets - featured their interview of me on the front page. The headline: "Coexistence is the only option - Washington is beginning to internalize this." This has been my thesis since Trump's reelection - a thesis that was, to put it mildly, not the prevailing view. But the events of today speak for themselves. Link to the interview: m.guancha.cn/ArnaudBetrand/…

@sov_media It would be a classic full-circle moment if Trump faced an airport malfunction when he arrives in China—a total repeat of the staircase snub Obama dealt with. Remember that awkward walk down the back stairs?

CHINA STRIKES BACK AT IRAN SANCTIONS More than two months into his ill-conceived, flagrantly illegal war on Iran, Donald Trump is flailing to salvage any semblance of success. Not only did the US and Israel abjectly fail in their strategic objectives: they're now in a far worse position than before, with Iran firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz. Until Trump's farcical 'double blockade' and the short-lived fiasco of 'Project Freedom', Iran was even exporting more oil daily than it was prior to the war. Trump is now turning in desperation to China, the primary buyer of Iranian oil, to extricate him from this debacle of his own making. Just months ago he had expected to waltz into Beijing in late March, having choked off two of its main energy suppliers in just the first quarter of 2026. Now, with just days to go before his rescheduled visit, he's all but begging for a face-saving concession from his unamused hosts. Absent any kind of leverage over Iran itself, the US has upped the ante by directly sanctioning one of China's largest refineries processing imported Iranian crude. Thus far, the Treasury Department has only gone after small 'teapot refineries' so insulated from the world market that the illegal 'long-arm jurisdiction' of the US can't affect their operations anyway. But Hengli Petrochemical is different: it's an order of magnitude bigger than the others and occupies an essential place in Northeast China's energy matrix. This time, China was done skirting under the radar. It had no choice but to strike back directly at this affront to its sovereignty. For the first time ever, it invoked the 2021 Blocking Rules and ordered that the sanctions 'shall not be recognised, implemented, or complied with' by any entity subject to Chinese law. In so doing, China is not just depriving Trump of much-needed leverage going into his trip to Beijing. It's making a huge stride toward global delinking from US hegemony and the construction of a genuinely multipolar world order. @VoxUmmah @venanalysis @qiaocollective @ProgIntl @KawsachunNews @OrinocoTribune @blkagendareport @SoberaniaPod

🚄🇨🇳 High-speed rail competitions in the world: China joined in 2002, skyrocketed in 2007, became the top in just two years in 2009. Now, China’s high-speed rail network is longer than all the others combined.

@ricwe123 Rejected by NATO then Germany.

Maybe future generations will understand the colossal gift Germany threw away with Vladimir Putin. A Russian leader who lived in Dresden for years, speaks German, whose daughter was born in Saxony, and who repeatedly offered genuine partnership and friendship to the German people. Around the turn of the millennium, there was a real chance to combine Russian resources with German engineering and build a powerful, nearly untouchable alliance stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Instead, short-sighted and corrupt German politicians sabotaged it all, aligning themselves with those who would rather see Germany and Russia locked in a devastating conflict. What could have been a historic partnership was tossed aside for political expediency, and the consequences are still unfolding. Here is the historic speech the Russian president delivered in German to the Bundestag on September 25, 2001. He directly addressed the German people, a moment that, had it been seized, would have changed everything.......

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

As a great man once said, “What a long strange trip it’s been.” See y’all back in Freak City, USA.

Thailand is one of the first ag countries to enter a planting season since the Iran war. We went to document the impact of supply shocks to fuel/fertilizer — It was worse than I anticipated. Farmers are leaving huge tracts of land barren bc they can’t afford to plant.

81 years ago the Soviet Union, together with their American and other allies, defeated the scourge of Nazi Germany. Today many in the West seek to forget the role played by the Soviet Union and the sacrifices made to achieve this victory. It is essential that we never forget our shared history, and the lessons derived there of. Never forget, and never forgive. On Thursday night I had the honor of attending the Victory Day celebration at the Russian Embassy. The Russian officers of the Defense Attaché Office are some of the finest men I ever met. It is good that we are friends. Happy Victory Day!

She was sold to a brothel at fourteen. By thirty, she had become the first woman in Chinese history to win a scholarship to study art in Paris. By forty, her nude paintings were scandalizing both Shanghai and the Seine—too bold for Mao's China, too foreign for the purists, yet too brilliant to ignore. Her name was Pan Yuliang, and for most of the 20th century, she was a ghost: erased from Chinese textbooks, stored in Parisian archives under "unknown artists," and buried in an attic in suburban Montparnasse with four thousand paintings stacked around her coffin. Today, art historians are finally whispering what they should have said decades ago: she was China's own Matisse. But here's the thing about Pan Yuliang—she didn't just paint nudes. She painted from the nude. From a place of intimate knowledge that no male artist, East or West, could fake. Having survived the brothels of Wuhu, she understood vulnerability as power, the female body not as object but as sanctuary. Her women lounge and stretch and gaze back at you, unashamed, painted in a wild fusion of impressionist color and traditional ink brushwork. Critics called her work obscene. She called it truth. And when China turned its back on her in 1937, she chose exile in Paris over erasure at home, teaching at Beaux-Arts for half a man's salary and quietly outliving every one of her tormentors. We desperately wanted to feature her stunning paintings in this post—but most of Pan Yuliang's surviving masterpieces are nudes, and social media platforms simply won't allow us to share them. So instead, we leave you with this: a woman who painted her way from a brothel to the Beaux-Arts, who died whispering to return her work to China, and whose spirit—as one art historian put it—still waits in a cold museum storage room, calling us to finally see her. © Women In World History #archaeohistories

I want to state clearly and openly: those who attempt to legitimize Myanmar’s military leaders and their associates by bringing them into ASEAN are deeply insulting the Burmese people who continue to fight courageously against these unjust and brutal practices. #ASEAN #Myanmar

China declared the end of extreme poverty in early 2021 after one of the largest anti-poverty campaigns in human history. But some still seem to be asking: did it really happen? Recently, "China said it ended poverty. Did it?" by @WillLangley96 of the Financial Times, raised doubts about the authenticity and sustainability of China's poverty alleviation efforts, based on his interview in two counties of southwest China's Guizhou Province. Such doubts are not new. But when they are built on limited samples, unverified details, selectively presented anecdotes, and missing context, the report goes beyond differing perspectives and raises questions of validity. Since 2012, China has pursued a new phase of poverty alleviation through a combination of industrial development, labor mobility, transport and communication facility expansion, and health insurance subsidies. In late 2020, Guizhou, one of China's most impoverished provincial regions, announced that its last nine poor counties had been lifted out of poverty, marking the removal of all 832 registered poor counties in China. A transition period then followed, with continued monitoring and support for those lifted out of poverty and those at risk of slipping there. To better understand the claims made and stories told in this China poverty report, I conducted a careful review, cross-checking key details with colleagues and relevant authorities. The result is: a number of the article's core assertions rely on fragile evidence, and in some cases fail to meet basic standards of verification. Here's a point-by-point fact-check on the Financial Times report. The article opens with a portrait of how Yang Nai Yan Qing, in her 60s, lives a frugal life, claiming that her monthly living expenses are less than 200 yuan (29 USD). Apart from special occasions, such as the Spring Festival, when she "buys some meat if she can afford it", Yang "eats only mustard greens, cabbage and sweet potatoes, almost all of which she grows herself in a field a long walk uphill. " Through this narrative, the image of an elderly woman struggling in hardship and deserving sympathy, is gradually constructed. This week, however, when our colleague in Guizhou visited Yang in Guizhou's Congjiang County, a different picture emerged. Yang's home is a self-built, three-and-a-half-storey house, one of the larger residences in the village. The ground floor alone measures around 160 square meters. Her family is not impoverished, so the house was not government-provided, but built at their own expense about a decade ago. With her permission, my colleague took photographs of both the interior and exterior. Judge by yourself whether the portrayal of poverty holds up. Near her home stands a pagoda-like structure known as a drum tower, a distinctive feature of the Dong ethnic group (top right). It's like a community center, serving as a communal space for discussion, decision-making, festivals, and other collective activities. At its top sits a drum that functions as the village's traditional "information hub" and "alarm system": specific drumbeats are used to convey messages and mobilize villagers, before the advent of modern communication. Granny Yang recalled that around January 30 this year, a foreigner arrived at her home by car with a Chinese assistant. The man, supposedly Langley, did not identify himself as a journalist. Out of hospitality, she invited them inside for a chat. She did not understand the purpose of the visit and simply took Langley and his assistant as tourists; to this day, she still does not know what the Financial Times is. The size of Granny Yang's kitchen is spacious (bottom left)-larger, I should admit, than my own bedroom in Beijing. She showed her double-door refrigerator, which was well stocked with meat (bottom right). Perhaps, the Financial Times should consider interviewing me next time. She explained that she simply does not like eating meat. In the past, when life was more difficult, she could not afford it even if she wanted to, but now she can have it whenever she wishes. Yang, 63, and her husband, 68, each receive pensions of around 200 yuan (29 USD) per month. Her mother-in-law, who is over 90, receives both a pension and an additional allowance for the elderly. Altogether, the elderly members of the household have a stable monthly income of nearly 700 yuan (102 USD). Her son and daughter-in-law have stable jobs as a driver and a salesperson, respectively. The annual income of the household they live in together is close to 80,000 yuan (11,702 USD). Her daughter is operating a start-up. Her children also give her some pocket money each month. And, the family owns a private car. The FT also reported "many of her neighbours were relocated to newer apartment blocks downhill." However, my colleague has verified that there has been no unified resettlement in the village. The so-called new apartments are mostly self-built homes constructed by villagers in recent years. Granny Yang herself has also retained a traditional wooden house not far away, which has clear ethnic characteristics and is not in disrepair. Langley wrote that "she says her life has barely changed." We are not sure whether this reflects a communication gap, but judging from her diet storage and housing conditions, the changes have in fact been quite significant. Perhaps what has remained unchanged is her long-standing habit of frugality. To equate such a lifestyle directly with poverty risks oversimplifying a more complex reality and reinforcing a selective narrative. It's a compelling story, until you start checking the details. This is just part of my response. Will posting more today.

And this last visit was by Trump himself in 2017, right at a time he shifted U.S. policy towards China from (supposed) engagement towards open confrontation and containment. A strategy of containment which, objectively, failed in just about every respect (economically, technologically, militarily, geopolitically, etc.) If anything it's the U.S. that ended up being contained - or at least immensely more isolated - instead of China. This is actually a pretty symbolic way to think about this upcoming visit: some visits symbolize a new approach, others its failure.

How to say: "We've lost big time against Iran – and actually, I think our military sucks," ...without actually saying that. 😂👍 A true diplomat 😎

China confirms it helped Pakistan’s air force during last year’s war with India #Echobox=1778226540" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">scmp.com/news/china/mil…

@WritingByMatt @GavTheGaffer Jamaican roti is the same way in Toronto. Bread and potatoes with a little meat. A traditional peasant meal really but always priced way above it's class

@GavTheGaffer Those things aren’t index-worthy items. Pizza is quite standard in overhead cost but has wildly different margins.

Next month Matt discovers wine, cheese, steak and chocolate...

🇨🇳 China spends BILLIONS on development, NOT WAR!

@WritingByMatt True that

A pizza costs the same in Bangkok as it does in NYC, Paris, and Dubai

China built a $20 billion oil refinery in Nigeria, and Europe is furious. Nigeria, one of Africa's largest oil producers, had no refinery. For decades, it exported crude and imported gasoline at markup. China's Dangote Oil Refinery in Lagos changed that. Now Nigeria is exporting refined gasoline instead of just raw crude. The refinery is operating at 94% of its 650,000-barrel-per-day capacity, meeting domestic demand with surplus shipped abroad. In March, Nigeria exported approximately 44,000 barrels of gasoline per day. A single shipment of 317,000 barrels reached Mozambique—the first delivery to East Africa. Production is projected to reach 1.4 million barrels per day within three years, making it Africa's largest refinery. For decades, Western oil majors kept Nigeria dependent while extracting crude, refining it abroad, and selling it back at a premium. China built the infrastructure Europe refused to. Now Nigeria controls its own energy supply chain, and European refiners are losing a captive market. This is what economic sovereignty looks like. This shouldn’t surprise any of our subs, we covered this story back in November on DD Geopolitics.

The West Refused to Honor the 27 Million Dead Soviets who Defeated Hitler on the 80th Anniversary Jeffrey Sachs: And the shame of it is that we in the United States, or in Britain, or in continental Europe are so nasty not to recognize that fact that the Soviet Union lost 27 million people defeating Hitler and bore the brunt of it. And then would not even show up to the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Hitler because it was Russia—but Russia defeated Hitler, bearing the vast brunt of the war. And this shows the mindlessness of our countries, actually of our leadership—how cruel. By the way, same with China, incidentally. China lost an estimated 14 million people to Japan’s invasion, and when China had the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan, no Western government would show up. The ingratitude, the lack of the most basic decency and historical knowledge, is really something disgusting on our side. And then Trump—because, I mean, I hate to come back to him in this context—but he says, “Yes, we defeated Hitler and Russia helped.” I mean, it just is the cruelty of the stupidity, because there’s stupidity, of course, but it’s so stupid it becomes absolutely cruel in its stupidity. That’s where we are.

Status update: visiting Chin Swee Caves Temple (清水岩庙) in Genting, Malaysia. Besides China, Malaysia is probably the one country in the world where the local Chinese community (which is huge: 23% of the population) is most faithful to Chinese traditions - and in many ways are even more traditional than in China. This particular temple is dedicated to Patriarch Ching Chwee (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch…), a Northern Song dynasty Buddhist monk from Fujian province, and of course to Buddha.