Bridging both sides of the Great Firewall. Focusing on geoeconomic and political trends. Full-time polyglot 🇵🇹 🇪🇸 🇮🇹 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 🇯🇵 自强不息、厚德载物
Beijing
Joined November 2017
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Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
Latin America’s shift toward the Donroe Doctrine’s right-wing authoritarianism is on full display in Ecuador.
Under Washington-backed President Daniel Noboa, leftist opposition leader Luisa González was barred from running and is now imprisoned under dubious, politically motivated charges.
Amid growing anger over austerity and repression, Noboa’s government appears to turn toward dictatorship, weaponizing the justice system against political opponents.
The U.S. constantly rails against left-wing “dictatorships” while aiding in their creation under their chosen vassals.
No other country suffered more from the unconstitutional dissolution of the Soviet Union than Ukraine.
Zelensky is absolutely right. In 1991, Ukraine inherited an extraordinary economic foundation, with a highly educated workforce, formidable scientific and industrial capacity (including Antonov and the Donbass and Krivbas industrial regions), vast natural resources and some of the world’s best agricultural land.
Politically, too, Ukraine had considerable advantages. Under Brezhnev (who came from Dnepropetrovsk region), officials associated with the Ukrainian party apparatus occupied many of the Soviet Union’s most powerful positions. Ukraine therefore entered independence with an established political and managerial elite.
It also emerged without any responsibility for Soviet external debt (which Moscow was forced to assume in exchange for Soviet overseas assets).
Yet just 15 years later, Ukraine’s GDP per capita was roughly half that of Russia and Poland in purchasing power terms, while in nominal US dollars, the disparity was even greater.
Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
feels like there's kind of an elephant in the room with this map but I can't quite put my finger on it
Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
Was discussing this with my foreign affairs history professor here in Beijing.
Japan spent 1500+ years learning from China and grew prosperously. As soon as it noticed the West had gotten stronger, it started studying the West.
When will it realize it's time to switch teams?
Japan ‘months’ from running out of critical rare earth as China squeezes supply ft.trib.al/4S9s4sy
Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
Meanwhile in the French legislature, the communist deputy faced down a jeering Zioright majority
"The Communist Party shed its blood for France.
The only blood on our hands is Nazi blood. And the blood of your ancestors -- who were collaborators!"
Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
Legally married! We will be having a traditional Uyghur wedding ceremony in Xinjiang soon😁
Angloids are scared of a world where they can't safely declare economic war on any country they like due to globalization and interdependency.
In other words, they're scared of the world they stated they wanted to create.
President Xi’s aim is to make the world dependent on China, while China depends on no one.
Without a coalition of countries to counter it, he will succeed.
thetimes.com/comment/columni…
In a better world, European nations would be providing full support for the Palestinian Resistance, blockading Israel and ultimately intervening to disarm and denazify Israel.
BREAKING: Masked Israeli "settlers" attacked a convoy of European diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland during an olive harvest visit to the Christian Palestinian village of Taybeh, near Ramallah.
Seven settlers on ATVs surrounded the vehicles, demanded IDs, threw stones and smashed the window of a Belgian consulate car.
Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 retweeted
This is a really funny Xi video, which I've never seen before. I just added subtitles in English to it 👇
He explains the art of giving gifts to foreign leaders. The South Korea anecdote is particularly hilarious: he explains that when China had to find a gift for President Park Geun-hye, they went through her autobiography, where she wrote that if she’d ever had a first love (she was unmarried), he would be Zhao Zilong, a legendary general from the Three Kingdoms. So they had Fan Zeng, one of China’s most famous painters, paint her crush 😂
Xi can’t resist adding that Zhao Zilong happens to come from Zhengding, the county he ran in the 1980s, which makes him "very proud too."
Xi’s actual point is that good diplomacy is personal and that you need to do deep research on the people you’re dealing with: reading their biographies, knowing their taste, their history, etc. It signals respect and, as he puts it, is "a very, very effective way of reaching people’s hearts."
7 years ago, China exported just as many cars as it imported.
They then made it a priority to grow the market for electric and hybrid vehicles
Today, China exports nearly 30 times more cars than it imports.
Deng Xiaoping once said: "Let some people get rich first." meaning that development should be prioritized over and above egalitarianism.
The Western corporate media framed this, for the longest time, as "let only a few people get rich."
Guess what? Now it's time to give back.
this is why they want you to hate China
Across China, tax officials have gone into overdrive to boost receipts from the country’s richest people and biggest companies: bloomberg.com/news/features/…
A secret recording of Hitler speaking privately where he admits:
- The USSR was far better prepared than the Nazis had ever imagined (because they thought "Communism doesn't work")
- The Soviets ALWAYS played hardball in non-aggression pact negotiations
They just made 1 million Julian Assanges
HAPPY NEWS!
This new life would not have been possible without all those who fought to bring @JulianAssange home❤️❤️
This is not just an AI scare story. It's about American Imperialism.
The US would have no business boarding a Chinese ship delivering anything to Iran.
BREAKING: The US "almost started a war" against China, nearly launching an operation against a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring, in the midst of the Iran war, after an AI-generated intelligence report falsely identified the vessel as carrying nuclear weapons components, with armed US personnel preparing to board and military aircraft already in the air before officials found the report had been produced with a chatbot, per CNN.
A special operations command analyst had used a chatbot to fuse open-source material with classified signals intelligence, then used AI again to package the result into a standard intelligence report and circulated it across the US military.