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Artificial algorithms on the open web. 杂七杂八，英中夹杂。 Sharing ≠ Endorsement. 联系请发送消息至 @tombenbot
Successful doctoral thesis using DEVONthink
Just wanted to drop a note to say thank you to the DEVONThink team. I have recently successfully completed my DPhil at Oxford, and actually finished somewhat early compared to my deadline. I used DT extensively, and am super happy with its search, ability to work across different formats of documents, and be scripted, all of which I used heavily. Thank you!
Recently, our attention got caught by the extraordinary career of a diligent student from Oxford, England. This May, Lyndon Drake received his Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in Theology: Congratulations! We are honored to be part of his journey and happy to share some of his thoughts and tips with you.
I submitted my thesis after five years of part-time work, the same time many full-time students need. DEVONthink was a significant part of being able to work efficiently.
Lyndon’s wish: some convenient way to keep thoughts and comments, annotations and notes, in the same Markdown document attached to the actual PDF.
The main task is to simply sit down every single day and write words.
US extends science pact with China: what it means for research
The US government has extended for six months a key symbolic agreement to cooperate with China in science and technology. The agreement was due to expire on 27 August, and its short-term extension has revived researchers’ hopes that the 44-year-old pact will continue.
The pact does not provide research funding. Rather, it is an umbrella agreement to encourage collaboration and goodwill between US and Chinese government agencies, universities and institutions doing research in agriculture, energy, health, the environment and other fields. The extension means that, for now, research will continue as normal.
我一直觉得中国的宪法是一个非常值得研究的主题，没想到已经有人做过研究，还写了这本书。
此书的标题，再配上这个封面，简直完美体现了 PRC 宪法的特点。当刘少奇、秦刚等权贵拿着宪法宣读其中的内容时，作为普通人，则应该拿出这本书来读一读。
How to Talk to People Who Disagree With You Politically
It can be challenging to talk to people who disagree with you politically. In this study, the Center for Media Engagement interviewed people who live in communities with a mix of political beliefs to glean their best strategies for talking to those with whom they disagree. The results offer five main approaches to talking across political differences.
• Focus on the people, not the politics
• Find common ground
• Stick to the facts and avoid confrontation
• Be an advocate, rather than an opponent
• Pick your battles
https://mediaengagement.org/research/divided-communities/
习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想学生读本（小学低年级）
李老师发的图片在 PDF 页码的第 8、51、52 页。大多数情况下，我会将将扫描版 PDF OCR，但这本书不值得这样做。
秦晖：想象下一个十年
02:55
有人说，中国现在经济发展了，但缺软实力。为什么？因为我们老是被西方的理念牵着鼻子走。我们应该提自己的价值，就是「仁义道德」。什么叫「仁义道德」呢？在十九世纪五六十年代，很多汉人出身的理学名臣，根本不知道西学是什么，但是他们一到了西方，第一个感觉就是那才是仁义道德。他们所讲的仁义道德，主要是讲西方国家对自己的人民的确是仁义道德，不涉及西方人对待中国人。
04:52
回过头来一看，中国对自己人是什么态度？很简单，就是不仁、不义、不道、不德。用他们的话来讲：二千年来之政，秦政也，皆大盗也；二千年来之学，荀学也，皆乡愿也；惟大盗利用乡愿，惟乡愿媚大盗。 #谭嗣同
05:35
不管你用的法理是民主自由人权，还是仁义道德，任何人对基本的真善美都有一定的标准。但是黑的就是黑的，白的就是白的，善的就是善的，恶的就是恶的，这一点不会因文化的差异而改变。当然，由于既得利益的结果，会引起价值观的扭曲。
严复在 1895 年写了一篇文章《救亡决论》，虽然写于 128 年前，但此文今天读来似乎完全没有过时。
他主张废八股：
> 八股取士，使天下消磨岁月于无用之地，堕坏志节于冥昧之中，长人虚骄，昏人神智，上不足以辅国家，下不足以资事畜。破坏人才，国随贫弱。此之不除，徒补苴罅漏，张皇幽渺，无益也，虽练军实、讲通商，亦无益也。
讲西学：
> 盖欲救中国之亡，则虽尧、舜、周、孔生今，舍班孟坚所谓通知外国事者，其道莫由。而欲通知外国事，则舍西学洋文不可，舍格致亦不可。
痛斥愚民政策：
> 日本年来立格致学校数千所，以教其民，而中国忍此终古，二十年以往，民之愚智，益复相悬，以与逐利争存，必无幸矣。
批判中国传统：
> 今夫中国，非无兵也，患在无将帅。中国将帅，皆奴才也，患在不学而无术。
> 晚近更有一种自居名流，于西洋格致诸学，仅得诸耳剽之馀，于其实际，从未讨论。意欲扬己抑人，夸张博雅，则于古书中猎取近似陈言，谓西学皆中土所已有，羌无新奇。如星气始于臾区，勾股始于隶首；浑天昉于玑衡，机器创于班墨；方诸阳燧，格物所宗；烁金腐水，化学所自；重学则以均发均悬为滥觞，光学则以临镜成影为嚆矢；蜕水蜕气，气学出于亢仓；击石生光，电学原于关尹。哆哆硕言，殆难缕述。
> 华风之敝，八字尽之：始于作伪，终于无耻。
并借西人之口总结道：
> 中国自命有化之国也，奈何肉刑既除，宫闱犹用阉寺；束天下女子之足，以之遏淫禁奸；谳狱无术，不由公听，专事毒刑榜笞。三者之俗，蛮猓不如，仁义非中国有也。
所谓「自主研发」
严复曾说：
> 中国之政，所以日形其绌，不足争存者，亦坐不本科学，而与通理公例违行故耳。是故以科学为艺，则西艺实西政之本。设谓艺非科学，则政艺二者，乃并出于科学，若左右手然，未闻左右之相为本末也。
https://blog.retompi.com/post/deceptive-file-format/
Conceptions of Strategic Space in Republican China - Bill Hayton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKtH9nFDSo
‘Hold on to the Green Horse’: Popular Imaginations of the Health Code and the Cultivation of Algocratic Attunement in China in the COVID Era #健康码 #小红书 #消费主义 「守住绿马」
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Health Code played a decisive role in regulating Chinese citizens’ everyday activities, where securing a green code became essential.
This article examines an outburst of popular discourses around the ‘green code’ and its homophone ‘green horse’ on a popular Chinese platform, Xiaohongshu, revealing the multifarious ways in which people imagine and experience this algorithmic technology—whether as an instrumental task, an object of romanticization, or a trigger of casual superstition.
Such discourses betray an assortment of dispositions and responses that I call ‘algocratic attunment’, including proactive endorsement, pragmatic complicity, and convivial nonchalance. Entangled with consumerist culture, algocratic attunement is quietly cultivated by a host of private actors on social media, shoring up a sociocultural climate conducive to algorithmic governance.
To cite this article: Zou, Sheng. “‘Hold on to the Green Horse’: Popular Imaginations of the Health Code and the Cultivation of Algocratic Attunement in China in the COVID Era.” Journal of Contemporary China, August 23, 2023, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2251012.
Why China’s economy ran off the rails
For those subset of readers who are rolling their eyes and saying “Oh my God, ANOTHER China post?”, all I can say is, when there’s a big event that’s all over the news, people need a lot of explainers. And right now, the big event that’s in the news is China’s economic crisis.
If there’s a grand unified theory of China’s economic woes, it’s simply “too much real estate”.
But why? What about China’s political economy sent them down this path? As America and Japan learned, real estate bubbles are something that happens to a lot of economies, but China’s real estate sector looks far more swollen. I think there are at least two basic reasons China let that happen.
First, refusing to pump up real estate in response to the end of export-led growth, the 2008 financial crisis, and later economic threats would have run the risk of a recession.
The second reason China pivoted to real estate is that this helped local governments pay for things.
Export-led and FDI-led growth can’t go on forever, and when they run out, it’s better to divert capital toward building a well-balanced economy of high-tech manufacturing and services than to shower it on property developers and shadow banks. Pivoting to real estate will come back to bite an economy eventually.
I Just Spent Two Months in China. Don’t Believe the CCP Reporting 21% Youth Unemployment, It Is Definitely Way, Way Higher.
I’ve been to China a few times since 2000 and this is the first time I could see and hear deep structural stress on the economy and society. China has always felt like the Wild West to me because there’s just so many people there living on top of each other that everyone just looks out for themselves.
Even before COVID, I rarely saw common courtesies like the waiting in line and not being rude to strangers. That selfishness still exists but is now on hyperdrive since people don’t have easy access to jobs anymore. I’m curious how Xi is going to keep people in line when the wheels come off completely, it is not going to take much at this point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/15xgm7j/
Top voted reply: Bro is about to end up in a Chinese prison next time he visits.
中国的两种前途（2013）- 吴敬琏
两种可能的前途严峻地摆在前面：一条是沿着完善市场经济的改革道路前行，限制行政权力，走向法治的市场经济；另一条是沿着强化政府作用的国家资本主义的道路前行，走向权贵资本主义的穷途。这样，中国的经济就成为一场两种趋势谁跑得更快的竞赛。
How to Kill Chinese Dynamism by Yasheng Huang
In my new book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, I show that Hong Kong, at least until very recently, functioned as a hidden-in-plain-sight source of rule of law and market finance for many high-tech entrepreneurs in China.
Though mainland China does not have rule of law and market finance, it effectively outsourced those functions to Hong Kong after Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong and launched China’s reform era.
Hong Kong was still a British colony in 1994, and between 1997 and 2019, it operated under the “one country, two systems” formula. Though the territory was under Chinese sovereignty, it preserved its legal and operational autonomy as a historically laissez-faire economy with a market-oriented financial system, rule of law, and secure property rights. China did not furnish any of these core functions, but its reformist government made them available to some of its entrepreneurs.
Let’s get this straight: China’s success has less to do with creating efficient institutions than with providing access to efficient institutions elsewhere.
Outsourcing the Rule of Law
China is special not because it has cracked the code of state capitalism, but because its system has had an escape valve.
Hong Kong has been dragged away from the rule of law toward China’s “rule by law” – and this at a time of geopolitical tensions, deglobalization, and increasing economic insularity. New safe harbors have emerged, such as Singapore, but this time they are hosting economic refugees from China rather than performing the institutional functions that previously powered China’s high-tech entrepreneurship.
Soon, China will feel the effects of no longer being able to outsource the rule of law and the other basic ingredients of innovation-driven growth, and it will pay a steep price for getting basic economics so egregiously wrong.
Why Note-Taking Apps Don’t Make Us Smarter
One interpretation of these events is that the software failed: that journaling and souped-up links simply don’t have the power some of us once hoped they did.
Another view, though, is that they are up against a much stronger foe — the infinite daily distractions of the internet.
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
Initially, I threw myself into this kind of associative note-taking. I gathered links around concepts I wanted to explore (“the internet enables information to travel too quickly,” for example, or social networks and polarization). When I had an interesting conversation with a person, I would add notes to a personal page I had created for them. A few times a week, I would revisit those notes.
I waited for the insights to come.
And waited. And waited.
My second thought is that if you want to take good notes, you have to first extract your mind from the acid bath.
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,” Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my attention effectively?’”
这篇论文以 COVID-19 期间中国推出的健康码应用为研究对象，深入探讨了「生物识别公民身份」这一新兴社会调控模式在当代中国的实施与其局限性。论文首先回顾了从社会主义到新自由主义的转型过程中，党国的治理目标是如何从生物/生命政治型公民身份演变到生物识别型的。接着，借助媒体报道和社交媒体评论，文章揭示了健康码是如何强化这一生物识别范式，并通过切割原本较为稳定的生物/生命政治型公民身份的时间维度，以达到更严格的社会控制。这一预防性的控制系统不仅增强了国家的自我调节和自保能力，也提升了对人们生产力的管理，但它同时也打破了人们的传统生活习惯，并进一步边缘化了生产力逐渐减弱的群体，如老年人和残疾人。
在论文的结论部分，作者提到在 2021 年末完成该论文时，「躺平」在中国广泛流行。她们将健康码这一严格的社会控制手段与之联系起来，认为在当前愈发强大的监控体制下，生活变得越来越难以为继。很多中国人都觉得「躺平」是在面对不断扩大的社会不平等时，一种有效的不合作方式。这一充满矛盾和压力的局面使许多中国公民感到他们的生活不再可持续或值得活下去，这可能激发出更多创新性的抵抗和颠覆行为，为我们理解健康码这类严格的社会控制提供了新的视角。
Zhang, Jingxue, and Charlie Yi Zhang. 2023. “’Enter with Green Code Only’: Biometric Citizenship and Fragmented Living in China.” Journal of Asian Studies 82 (3): 385–406. https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-10471971.
When China thought America might invade
Mao was a revolutionary who saw terror and anarchy as useful tools. By contrast, Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, is an austere nationalist obsessed with order and party control. For his part, Mao seems to have relished China’s break with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and the turn to autarky that followed.
Mr Xi’s calls for self-reliance in food and in core technologies are more complicated. Even as his regime abhors dependency on America, its envoys tirelessly lobby Western allies in Asia and Europe to provide know-how that China needs to grow strong.
For all those differences, the Third Front should be studied by blithe sorts who insist that Mr Xi’s party must deliver growth and material prosperity to maintain its legitimacy, and so will never break with the rich West.
Economic self-interest is a powerful force. But a lesson from 1964 is that once America seemed truly to threaten China, economic planners fell silent and security fanatics took charge.
Useful Bullshit: Constitutions in Chinese Politics and Society
Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late 50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens―police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups―have responded.
Diamant, Neil J. 2021. Useful Bullshit: Constitutions in Chinese Politics and Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501761287.
Xi’s Age of Stagnation
China’s dominant twentieth-century leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, had adjusted their approach when they encountered setbacks; surely Xi and his closest advisers would, too. But none of that happened. Although the zero-COVID measures are gone, Beijing has clung to a strategy of accelerating government intervention in Chinese life.
Universities and research centers, including many with global ambitions, are increasingly cut off from their international counterparts.
Yet neijuan now permeates all aspects of life in Xi’s China, leaving the country more isolated and stagnant than during any extended period since Deng launched the reform era in the late 1970s.
Beijing’s bet seems to be that in order to withstand the pressures of an uncertain world, it must turn inward and succeed on its own. In doing so, however, it may instead be repeating the mistakes of its Eastern bloc predecessors in the middle decades of the Cold War.
Still more consequential may be the state’s now ubiquitous presence in Chinese intellectual life. Chinese leaders have always viewed universities somewhat suspiciously, installing party secretaries to oversee them and surrounding them with walls.
For outsiders, ordering a cab, buying a train ticket, and purchasing almost any goods requires a Chinese mobile phone, Chinese apps, and often a Chinese credit card. (Some apps now accommodate foreign credit cards, but not all vendors accept them.) Even a simple visit to a tourist site now requires scanning a QR code on a Chinese app and filling out a Chinese-language form. On one level, these hindrances are trivial, but they are also symptomatic of a government that seems almost unaware of the extent to which its ever more expansive centralization is closing the country off from the outside world.
Chinese astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi observed in 1990, “About once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from the memory of Chinese society.”
In the communist states of Eastern Europe, the general prosperity of the immediate post–World War II era had diminished by the 1970s, causing many to look to dissidents and critics for explanations of their new reality. Could this happen in a China entering a similar long-term stagnation?
“You can’t do anything publicly in China,” he said. “But we still work and wait. We have time. They do not.”
https://fxtwitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1697151288360788421
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「西方伪史论」为何在中国如此盛行？
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/699580.html
Scientists Used to Love Twitter. Thanks to Elon Musk, They’re Giving Up on It
Scientists are abandoning X in droves, according to a recent survey by Nature. Of the survey respondents, “more than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether.”
In this compelling and highly-readable account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. He brings alive the fevered debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent” a new vision of China.
Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how a few radicals, often living in exile, adopted European beliefs about race and nation to rethink China’s past and create a new future. He weaves together political and personal stories to show how Chinese nationalism emerged from the connections between east and west. These ideas continue to motivate and direct the country’s policies into the twenty first century. By asserting a particular version of the past Chinese governments have bolstered their claims to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia.
Hayton, Bill. 2020. The Invention of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300256062.
The Qing Conception of Strategic Space
In this essay, I argue that all three are either mythological or at best misleading. In fact, the Qing sense of strategic space was formed by military expansionism into China and Central Asia and by the Qing empire’s initial effort to restrict Han outward migration over land and sea.
The narrative described above, built on the tryptic of tianxia, Sinicization, and tributary system, was codified by John King Fairbank in 1968, though it reflects treasured tenets of Confucian ideology and propaganda that were originally formulated in the first millennium BCE. It is entirely wrong about the Qing empire.
The tianxia paradigm with its concentric rings and civilizational gradient leads to the assumption that the Qing did not concretely demarcate territory, or care to do so. That is untrue. For example, in negotiating its first treaty with a more or less European power—the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) concluded with Russia—the empire mobilized maps and landmarks to claim lands north of the Amur as Qing.
For most of its first two centuries, bridging the reigns of Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, the sector of strategic space dominating the Qing empire’s concern was the north and west where the Junghars were gathering power. This strategic concern drove the war economy and resulted in Qing westward expansion and ultimately the addition of Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet to the former Ming lands.
The Qing empire did not ignore the south or the sea, however, which offered strategic concerns of its own through the seventeenth century.
During their rapid expansion into non-Chinese lands, the Qing attempted imperial compartmentalization, actively trying to keep Han Chinese out of Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and sometimes even areas in the southwest inhabited by non-Chinese peoples.
The idea that these borderlands were colonies (zhimindi) and like European colonies should be used for resource extraction to benefit the center also became unapologetically popular among Chinese statecraft thinkers at this time.
The Qing empire did not Sinicize, it did not “become Chinese,” as we used to say. Rather, the concept of China began to be reinvented from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century to include new Qing conquests, regardless of vast ethnic and geographic diversity. It was at this time that in Chinese versions of treaties the Qing empire began to refer to itself not just as Da Qing, but as Zhongguo. This process, which we might call the Zhongguo-ization of the Qing empire, continued beyond the Qing fall in 1912, and still continues today. The PRC conviction that vast tracts of central Eurasia as well as Taiwan “belong to China” or have been “on the map of China since ancient times” is no less hotly held for being an invented tradition.
你是很好的孩子，不怕没有进步，但不可太用功。要多走路，多玩玩，身体好，进步更快。 #胡适
来源
Xi’s Apparatchiks Will Struggle to Revive Economy: China Watcher
“Xi Jinping and his closest advisers do not know much about the economy,” Lam, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation, told Nikkei Asia. “After the 20th Party Congress in October ... most of the people he promoted are not technocrats.
“They know very little about international trade, international finance, etc. They are mostly party apparatchiks who specialize in ideology ... propaganda. Most of them do not speak English,” Lam adds.
The appointment of Xi’s new top advisers in October marked a departure from a previous administration filled with educated technocrats well-versed in international finance and how foreign companies operate.
Summer on the Oregon Coast | Camping & Cooking in my 4Runner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4d83wucm-U
Stephen Kotkin held the same idea:
> People ask me all the time how come Gorbachev didn’t do a China? Well, first, they didn’t have enough Chinese. Secondly, he had no Hong Kong, which is to say a private entrepo, a financial system with the rule of law that made decisions investment decisions based upon economic not political criteria.
China’s defeated youth
Across China young people are disillusioned. They have been raised on stories of economic dynamism and social mobility. The Chinese economy more than doubled in size every ten years from 1978, when Communist Party leaders first adopted market reforms, until 2018. City kids could study hard, get into a good university and expect a white-collar job upon graduation. Lucky students from small towns or the countryside might do the same and make their way into the middle class. Less-educated young people had fewer options. But they could travel to cities, where rising wages in factories or on building sites were enough to start a family.
China is relying on increases in “human capital” (like education) to offset its decrease in humans. But the lying-flat phenomenon and high graduate unemployment show that is not enough. The tightening grip of the authorities over civil society, popular culture and entrepreneurs also would seem to discourage the risk-taking that marked earlier generations.
Some of China’s best-educated youngsters will no doubt emigrate. Others are seeking a different kind of safe harbour. Applications for the civil service are expected to jump again this year. And the share of graduates ranking state-owned enterprises as their first-choice employer has increased for three years in a row, according to the survey by Zhaopin. These businesses offer stability and security over dynamism and ingenuity. If China is to become the more innovative economy Mr Xi demands, it cannot afford to lose too many of its best minds to its least efficient firms.
Now, though, Mr Xi says the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation is to be achieved by focusing on collective goals, rather than by encouraging individual aspirations. He admonishes the young to obey the party and toughen up—to “engrave the blood of their youth on the monuments of history, just as our fathers did.” That is a message that relatively few young people are taking to heart. Told to eat bitterness, they prefer to let it rot.