Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️

I think ChatGPT for proofreading is fine, just don't fall into the traps. ask it to do proofreading with minimal changes. and always IGNORE its attempt to lure you for more: "do you want a polished version with improved flow"? "I can help you with this or that". just ignore.

Arendt or Levi prepares you for that. confronting viscerally the unthinkable crimes that were not the opposite of modernity but the very product of it. the technology of killing has only got more "advanced", violence more sanitized, genocide now live streamed. "We" have learned nothing.

I visited the Auschwitz museum for the first time last month and cried all the way on the bus back to Krakow, being a sentimental person. I thought about the past but perhaps even more about the present. no amount of reading

how deep is the moral abyss

yeah it's them as well. But CRCC is a massive enterprise with 25 sub companies, named numerically 中铁一局，二局…… 25局.
For the Chengdu-Xining HSR, the contractors are 中铁十一局、中铁十二局、中铁十四局、中铁十八局、中铁十九局、中铁二十五局.

I continue to think China Railway Construction Corp, "the most powerful and large-scale comprehensive construction company in the world" (per their bio), is the only account worth following on X. (if you're interested in the curated visuality of China's infrastructural modernity in the Global South)

This is a billionaire-funded Tony Blair lobbying project being funnelled unchallenged onto the front page of a national newspaper.
1/

yes. and high savings rate across East Asia in general...

and "compressed temporality". Property prices in Shanghai increased 20 times in the past 20 years (from 3000 cny/m2 in 2000 to 65k on average in 2021). here you might hear people bought houses with a fraction of today's price 50 years ago. In China's first tier cities it would be 5 or 10 years ago.

migrant workers and not "families". So the 23.7% home ownership is for non-hukou family household only, for the overall population it would be lower.

but 88% for hukou holders (native Shanghainese + migrants with higher socioeconomic status), 23.7% for non-hukou families. Now, there are 14 mil hukou residents & 10 mil non-hukou residents in Shanghai. The numbers don't quite add up. My sense is that many non-hukou residents are individual

substantial.
In Shanghai, home buying policy for local hukou holders is least restrictive, but for non-hukou holders they have to have paid 5 years of social security & meet other requirements before they can buy.
the overall home ownership is 68%,

secondly, structural disparities. people with a 体制内 job (public sector with formal rank) are entitled to high housing provident fund, paid by the employer, whereas people in the private sector either don't have it or it's much lower.
the divide between hukou and non-hukou residents is even more

so how can people afford homes? (btw the rent is also a lot lower than London/Paris, even though buying prices are the same level)
first of all for young people in China, buying home requires resources from two families combined: nicknamed 6 wallets 六个钱包, couple + 4 parents

thinking about the seemingly counterintuitive fact... property prices in Beijing/Shanghai are comparable to other global cities like London/Paris, but the average income is far lower. price to income ratio in SH is 50 times. In London it's 12-14. but home ownership in Chinese cities is far higher..

These are the top replies, being financially rewarded for posting this stuff, and the explanation offered by the site’s own AI for why it’s like that.

Anyway just flicking through the Sunday newspapers reading about some minor content infractions that Ofcom might look into at the BBC/Channel 4.

the hood: our fitter said "gigantic" 3 times and that he had never installed a hood this gigantic. aesthetically I didn't approve but the Sichuanese insisted. I don't do the cooking and it's not my lungs that are at stake, so my opinion doesn't count!

newly renovated kitchen with green cabinets, carrara quarts countertops, herringbone flooring, and minimalist decor.

newly renovated kitchen with green cabinets, carrara quarts countertops, herringbone flooring, and minimalist decor.

newly renovated kitchen with green cabinets, carrara quarts countertops, herringbone flooring, and minimalist decor.

before and after photo showing the transformation

middle aged bingo card: kitchen makeover! won't solve all your life problems but at least will solve your kitchen problem ;)

on the substack no one needed

Two bar charts showing translation data for PRC publishers. 1. Volume of Translations (2016–2018): Peaks in 2017 at 17,154, with 16,587 in 2016 and 16,071 in 2018. 2. Number of Translated Titles by Country (2017 vs 2018): US (English) drops from 6,217 to 5,047. UK (English) rises from 2,835 to 3,496. Japan (Japanese) slightly decreases from 2,101 to 2,075. France (French) drops from 1,133 to 1,024. Germany (German) drops from 933 to 881.

While the overall growth in the number of translations offered on the market increased from 369 titles in 2008 to a peak of 666 in 2016, there has been an 8.5% drop in translations over all genres released in the US since 2016. The top three most frequently translated languages (French, German, and Spanish) have dominated the list since 2008, with German a distant third and the following languages finishing off the top 10: Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, Chinese, Swedish, Russian, and Arabic.

I like to use this example to show the asymmetry in knowledge exchange. each year 8k-9k English titles are translated & published by PRC publishers, 16-17k for all foreignlanguages. meanwhile in the US it's a few hundreds. CN data from a friend in the industry.

Douban locked my post (others can no longer see), even though I think my tone is quite patriotic: "as a responsible great power and leader of the global south, shouldn't we break diplomatic ties with a country that's committing genocide, impose sanctions, divest - at least do one of them"?

The Political Subculture in Contemporary China: Moha and Its Transformation Abstract. This study explores the Moha political subculture on Chinese social media, closely linked to Jiang Zemin, the former supreme leader of China. Sch

I'm a bit shocked that people in 2025 are still studying this...
academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...

outside of academia, famous translators also carry intellectual prestige. you can be considered an expert or important intellectual by being a translator of books.

translation of academic books (published with Chinese presses) is considered legitimate outputs towards performance review/promotion. I don't think papers get translated regularly.

the hegemony of the English language in knowledge production. but I think it also has to do with how in some society, translation is recognized as active knowledge making rather than a technical service, and the translator is recognized as playing a unique cultural & intellectual role.

is translation undervalued in Anglophone academe? In China, translation is considered proper academic outputs, with both formal (e.g. for performance review & promotion) and informal recognition (reputation in wider society). it reflects (and constitutes)

60,000 Gazans have been killed. 18,500 were children. These are their names. Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one per hour since the war began.

This is the Washington Post (yes, that one): names in Arabic and English, and ages, of all 18,500 children killed in Gaza, plus portraits and stories where available: www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

"He walked 8 km to get there. No shoes. Probably hadn't eaten in days... he set down his bags and he put his hands on my face and he kissed me... he left and the IDF opened up with machine gun fire... There were dead Palestinians. He was one of them."

A five-year-old child.

My God Green Beret Anthony Agular recounts how a 5-year-old Palestinian kissed his hands to thank him for the food Agular gave him Seconds later, Israeli soldiers shot and killed the starving child ISIS prisoners were treated with more dignity than these children, Agular says

It is not possible to find the words for this.

Ketchup Is the Whitest Sauce: Memes as Silly/Serious Bordered Spaces in International Relations Abstract. This paper draws on previous scholarship on humor, memes, and seriousness in International Relations to produce a novel means for understanding o

Do you like ketchup? Not only are you wrong, but you may be a fascist. Not really, but in my 🍅New Publication🍅 "Ketchup Is the Whitest Sauce", in International Political Sociology, I argue that memes about ketchup showcase Neo-Nazi solidarity.
academic.oup.com/ips/article/...