Anouk

Mijn afscheidsverhaal vandaag in het FD over mijn bijna zes jaar in China, een vat vol tegenstrijdigheden: 'Correspondent zijn in China is leven in parallelle dimensies.' fd.nl/politiek/15524… #FD #Buitenland For English readers a translated version: acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc…

The video that got the Supermicro cofounder arrested

Good piece (and thread) by Lizzi Lee. She notes that "In fact Xi Jinping has long been frustrated with his bureaucrats. He complained about officials who “rack up a mountain of debt, pat their butts, and walk away,” chasing short-term growth at long-term cost." The irony, of course, is that wasted investment, rising debt, and a short-term orientation might not be caused by misaligned incentives or bureaucratic incompetence so much as by Beijing's growth model itself. The problem, in other words, is structural – because China cannot get consumption growth to outpace GDP growth, it cannot change bureaucratic behavior as long as it continues to set high GDP growth target. Getting consumption growth to outpace GDP growth in a meaningful way would require either -- a productivity miracle of historic proportions, one in which higher productivity shows up almost wholly as higher household income rather than as higher business profits or government revenue, -- a substantial (and possibly disruptive) redistribution of total income (GDP) from government, businesses and the rich to ordinary households, or -- much slower GDP growth. The first outcome would obviously be the preferred one, but it may depend too much on wishful thinking, especially as productivity growth has actually been declining for years. The second outcome would require major (and possibly disruptive) structural reforms that so far Beijing has been unwilling to consider, probably because these would anyway lead to the third outcome, which Beijing is so far unwilling to accept. This means that the only way local governments can meet Beijing's GDP growth target is by directing large amounts of cheap credit into rising property, infrastructure and manufacturing investment, whether or not these investments are economically justified. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is effectively what those much-criticized officials have done. Their behavior has responded more or less correctly to their incentives, which in turn were not the result of absent-mindedness but rather of the country's economic growth model. The fault, in other words, may lie not in the inefficient implementation of economic policies so much as in the policies themselves.

Proves these anti hightech export controls are pretty useless by now.

Iran just offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But only if you pay in yuan. CNN confirms, citing a senior Iranian official, that Tehran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers through the Strait provided the cargo is traded in Chinese yuan. Not dollars. Not euros. Yuan. The waterway that carries 20% of global oil, that seven P&I clubs closed through insurance, that a wounded Supreme Leader ordered permanently shut, that the United States just bombed the military defences of Kharg Island to force open, is being offered back to the world on one condition: the currency changes. This is the most consequential sentence of the war that nobody in the oil market has priced. The petrodollar system was born in 1974 when Saudi Arabia agreed to price oil exclusively in dollars in exchange for American military protection. That agreement has governed global energy trade for fifty-two years. Every barrel of crude on Earth has been denominated in dollars. Every central bank holds dollar reserves because oil requires them. Every nation that imports energy must first acquire dollars to pay for it. The system is the foundation of American financial hegemony, and Iran just proposed replacing it with yuan for the world’s most critical chokepoint. China is already the model. Eighty to ninety percent of Iranian crude exports to China settle in yuan or barter through CIPS, the Chinese cross-border payment system that processed 175 trillion yuan, approximately $24.5 trillion, in 2025, a 43% increase year on year. Since 28 February, 11.7 to 16.5 million barrels of Iranian crude have transited the Strait to China via shadow fleet under IRGC protection while every other nation’s shipping is locked out. China pays in yuan. China’s tankers move freely. Everyone else burns or reroutes. The war was supposed to force the Strait open. Instead it is being reopened selectively, on Iran’s terms, in China’s currency. America bombed Kharg to demonstrate it controls the island. Iran responded by demonstrating it controls the condition of passage. The military targets are rubble but the negotiating position is intact: the Strait opens when the currency changes. The implications cascade across every domain. If yuan-denominated tankers begin transiting Hormuz while dollar-denominated tankers remain locked out by insurance, mines, and IRGC targeting, the war produces a bifurcated oil market: yuan barrels for China and BRICS partners at Iranian-discounted prices, dollar barrels for the West at war-premium prices. Two prices for the same commodity. Two currencies for the same waterway. Two systems for the same barrel of oil. The fragmentation the dollar was designed to prevent is being accelerated by the war that was supposed to preserve it. China imports 45% of its crude through the Hormuz region. It holds 90 to 130 days of strategic reserves. Its teapot refineries process Iranian crude at $9 to $12 below Brent. Its CIPS system bypasses every Western sanction. And now the country whose Supreme Leader cannot stand is offering Beijing the one thing no amount of American airpower can bomb: a currency alternative for energy transit. The Strait is not reopening for ships. It is reopening for yuan. And the fifty-two-year-old system that priced every barrel in dollars just met the war that may end it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

City kids pfff…🙈

Tsja, het is gewoon dweilen met de kraan open. Oogst van even uurtje rapen deze week in straat rond huis en kantoor: parool.nl/gemeenteraadsv…

Just like humans ;) should not be a massive surprise as they get all their data and learning from input we created…

Interesting interview with former CCP official: ‘Ma said Xinjiang officials were sent on visits to Rwanda to study “a real genocide,”. He said the trips were designed to reduce their guilt when they saw how “benevolent” the Party is in comparison, but also to give them new ideas.

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

True that…

@niubi Wow

Wat ik interessant vind, is of het in overweging is genomen of bedacht is dat China het als signaal kan opvatten.

Was to be expected: bnr.nl/nieuws/economi…

Waarschuwing in zee te gaan met dit klusplatform @MrFixNL check vooral slechte reviews. Ze hebben heel vage procedure, en als je daar dan over belt, wordt ene Pieter aan de telefoon kwaad en beschuldigt je ervan dat je het zelf niet goed gedaan hebt. Daarna hangt ie je gewoon op.

Belangrijk werk van het ⁦@parool⁩ 👏goede regionale journalistiek - Ook VSP-fractie op UvA ontbonden, reacties op grensoverschrijdend gedrag VU-student Marlon U.: ‘Mijn bloed kookt als ik dit lees’ parool.nl/amsterdam/ook-…

Een ‘goede balans’ noemt de wethouder dat. De stroom is zeker laatst nog niet bij hem uitgevallen? Woningen, crèches en zwembaden kunnen niet gebouwd. Schandalig dit: "In Amsterdam komt een hyperscale voor Microsoft, ondanks het verbod op hyperscales" nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/01…

When you work 996 you take every opportunity for a powernap ;)

Maduro's laatste publieke optreden voor zijn gevangenneming was nog ontvangst van een Chinese delegatie; ook daarom een dikke hint aan China: ‘stay away from our back yard’. #UPDATE-91319916" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nos.nl/l/2596850#UPDA…

Gives great insight how structured the approach is from the Party in China to control the narrative of social media in the West:

Pretty spot on. The Belgium PM claims ‘Victory’ even. Yeah for Putin clearly.