Andrew Stokols

How is Xi remaking China's "urban ideology"? Find out in this new article on Xiong'an 雄安新区 for Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society doi.org/10.1093/cjres/…

"India has replaced China as the largest manufacturer of smartphones for the US in just four years. The latest iPhone in your pocket was made in India. They are doing the kind of high-precision manufacturing that people said only China could do," says Fareed Zakaria

@MsMelChen China also has significant investments and a history of friendship with Singapore; if it did as you are describing it would in effect completely jettison those, risking its legitimacy in SE Asia for generations, in order to accomplish the operational goals you mentioned...

Spot on with the Singapore-Dubai parallel - but the stakes are even more explosive than most realize. If the PRC launches its long-planned invasion of Taiwan, it will need to make sure the United States stays out of it. That means it must first neutralize America’s nearest major forward-deployed force which is the US 7th Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan. We’re talking 60-70 warships, 150-180 aircraft, and over 27,000 personnel. To keep that fleet out of the fight, Beijing would have no choice but to strike Japanese soil and bases preemptively - dragging sovereign Japan directly into the war. Japanese PM Takaichi enraged the Chinese for merely saying that this constitutes a "survival-threatening situation" for Japan and implying that Japan might be drawn into the conflict. The 7th fleet relies on logistics and sustainment from Task Force 73 / Logistics Group Western Pacific which is headquartered in the Republic of Singapore. Singapore’s role as the critical maintenance, resupply, and repair hub for US naval forces in the region makes it Target #2. Just like Iran hit UAE facilities for hosting American support, the PLA would have to take out Singapore’s ports, airfields, and logistics nodes to choke off the flow of fuel, ammo, and spares. In other words, there's a huge potential for a regional cataclysm: direct attacks on Japan and Singapore, the Malacca Strait turned into a war zone, global shipping paralyzed, and the entire US-led alliance structure under fire. The idea that China is pursuing “peaceful development” is hard to believe when you consider its military buildup - hypersonic missiles, carrier-killers, anti-access/area-denial systems - that seem to prepare them to deal with exactly this problem of a regional fight for control and navigation of the seas. Not many people are aware that there are 3,000 active Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) troops on rotational deployments throughout each year in Taiwan. While this is for military training (it's been ongoing since 1975), this could further complicate things for Singapore in a Taiwan conflict scenario. These troops might be trapped or become bargaining chips during a blockade or invasion. Anyway, tl;dr: Singapore likely won't be able to stay out of it as the chokepoint it sits in will probably come into play

@kyleichan Also taking a peer review of an article. Uploading that alongside the original And developing a plan for revision. Basically suggesting structure and I do the actual writing

Three ways you should be using AI at an absolute minimum if you do any kind of writing or research: 1. Final check on any important writing or emails. Tell it to look line-by-line for typos, mistakes, etc. Beats regular spellcheck. 2. Break writer's block by giving it fragments of ideas and having it generate a first-pass block of text. I almost never use this first-pass output, but it gives me ideas for how to connect idea fragments. 3. Supercharged search, especially for things not published recently. Beats regular Google search for this. Always be skeptical of AI output. Even the most powerful frontier models still make mistakes. But I would not publish anything important these days without at least running it through an AI check, and even with major statements or claims I often check with AI--won't catch everything but will catch some things.

@kyleichan I find it most helpful at processing large batches of my own data (documents, text extraction, putting unstructured data quickly into usable forms

"Markets, I’m seated at every table, regional, local, global. Taxes, simple; rates, low; Investors, entreprenerurs, gamechangers, the world is here, try to keep up"

Featuring a young attractive woman of vaguely Eurasian origin: "They say you can’t put a face on money, yet here I am; lets be clear I’m complicated ; I drive ambition, empower dreams, build legacies; everywhere else tries to reshape me, HK lets me be me."

Hong Kong has dispensed with "Asia's world city" branding, just going full-stop on shameless promotion of wealth and conspicuous consumption: The most cringey ad by the HK financial services council is playing on my Cathay flight "Where Money Comes to Grow"...

Peer review in the 1950s be like

2026 provincial viewership of CCTV Spring Festival Gala (春晚), once the world's most-watched TV event, shows sharp divide: Northern provinces dominate — generally 70%+; South lags — Guangdong ~3–4%, Guangxi 0.9% (bottom), Hainan ~1%. Pattern (consistent for 15+ years): highest ratings in colder, more traditional, less developed northern regions. Lowest in warmer, open, prosperous coastal/southern provinces.

With a $27.4 billion endowment, MIT is resorting to "austerity" measures like closing down its iconic libraries, laying off librarians. what a sad state of affairs...@thetech thetech.com/2025/12/04/mit…

🔓 #NEW in #UrbanStudies ✍️ @astoks examines how certain urban districts and high-profile sites in #Singapore are conceptualized as “showrooms” for the #infrastructure and urban #technologies they aim to export around the world. 📖 buff.ly/j9uBRnG

nonstop construction in Singapore continues..even on Valentines day morning, saturday. 😩 nothing gets in the way of profits of real estate developers and the dream of 99-year condo ownership!

China's tech accomplishments are not a "potemkin village'--the Russian analogy is overdone here, but China does have real vulnerabilities (demographics, property bubbles, youth unemployment etc) that are not captured by quick breathless visits to high-tech factories

@ZeyiYang What a simplistic and silly take by Arnaud, but of course not surprised.

ah that’s just not true. The way religion mixed with politics in ancient China is very different from how it worked in the West, therefore seeing it from a Western perspective, someone would think there never was religious influence in China. But ancient Chinese societies do have religious orders and the politic system worked hand-in-hand with it. The fact that ancient China has stable dynasties and social orders that respect the emperor’s reign—all of that is literally reinforced through religious teachings, borrowing legitimacy from supernatural being (non-ironically the Mandate of Heaven!) to justify political control.

Singapore's demolition and construction is not new; but I feel its gone into overdrive recently--the perpetual sound and pollution from construction literally pervades the city 24/7 except for brief Sunday respite. This certainly doesn't feel like a city in a garden

I occasionally use AI chat as a conversation/idea generation partner, but try to avoid using internal LLM and focus on using it as a tool to process my own data, and assist with generating python scripts I can later run myself (and troubleshooting those scripts)

I ended up going back to ChatGPT for my mainstay workhourse (basic plan $20/month) because I think its still the most versatile and adaptable of the platforms.

I started as AI skeptic, but I've been using it a lot for academic research; let me share some of what I've found so far; as someone with close to 0 software background, the most useful thing for me has been data extraction and processing of documents....

@jcmittelstaedt How much did they pay Jeffrey Sachs for this forward ? 💰🤷‍♂️

stumbling over rather bizarre(?) books - third paragraph of the foreword has "Deng Xiaoping" spelt wrongly as "Deng Xioaping" book promises to "discover the soul, the very essence of China" (xi)