u/agenbite_lee

China has had a series of court rulings saying that companies could not lay off workers and then replace them with AI.

>“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood. Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests."

Do economists think that is a good idea or a bad idea?

tl;dr - I just published a book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read, which explains the historical narratives fueling today’s most volatile geopolitical flashpoints: Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the Chinese economy. Is a war over the Taiwan Strait inevitable? How did Xinjiang become the human rights dumpster fire of the 21st century? What is the historical reality behind "ancient" territorial claims in Taiwan? The book tackles these without the academic "mumbo jumbo," focusing on the messy, human history that drives China’s role in geopolitics. AMA related to the history behind the topics Xi and Trump are talking about right now.

Hey reddit, my name is Lee Moore, I have a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Oregon, I worked as an adjunct professor there, teaching Taiwanese and Chinese literature and film, and I occasionally write for The Economist. I also host the Chinese Literature Podcast. 

I just published a book called China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read (available on my indie publisher’s site) and also from a little bookstore based in Seattle). 

The book does a deep dive into the history of the four China-related topics driving geopolitical discussions: Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy and Hong Kong. How did Taiwan become the point that where WWIII is most likely to start? Why is Beijing conducting a genocide in Xinjiang? Is the Chinese economy the 800 pound gorilla about to dominate the world, or is it a house of cards teetering on the point of collapse? Why did Beijing deep six freedoms in Hong Kong despite having agreed with Britain to not change anything for 50 years after the Handover?

And I do it with a shit-stirring sense of humor that is meant to reach readers who would never normally pick up a book about China. The book has a chapter titled, “The Most Important Motherfucker in Taiwanese History,” discussing the 1670’s sex scandal that rocked the island and may lead to a war between the US and China. In the section of the book detailing Xinjiang’s bloody history, the book has a drinking game where, every time someone is beheaded, the reader is encouraged to do a shot.

The book discusses the China-related topics driving geopolitics. Here are some of the things the book discusses: 

Taiwan: 

• Today, as Chairman Xi is meeting with President Trump, he is telling Trump that Taiwan, since ancient times, has been Chinese. That claim  is nonsense. No power in China controlled Taiwan before 1683, two years after Pennsylvania, its 12th of 13 colonies, was established. The first documented case of a Chinese person stepping on the island of Taiwan was in 1603. Some Chinese sailing guides, written as early as the 1560’s, refer to bits of Taiwan as land that could be spotted from sea, but there is no documented case of a Chinese person stepping foot on Taiwan before 1603. China’s claim to have owned Taiwan in ancient times has zero historical evidence supporting it. 
• Today, the US Marines are training to invade southern Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion. This is not the first time they were there. In 1867, the US Marines twice invaded Taiwan. 
• American politicians are worried about how to protect Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, the crown jewel of the Taiwanese Miracle. In fact, the Taiwanese Miracle was partially the creation of American politicians. Eisenhower pushed Chiang Kai-shek to enact the “Land to the Tillers” program, which helped jumpstart the Taiwanese economy in the 1950’s. From 1951 to 1965, the US doled out $1.5 billion in economic aid. In the 1960’s, Washington told Taiwan it needed to graduate from aid, the Stanford Research Institute cooked up a plan that would shift the Taiwanese economy from agriculture to high-end tech products. Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance is a direct result of American government investments in the 1950’s.
• Taiwanese democracy is also a product of American politicians. In the 1980’s, America grew tired of supporting despots just because they were anti-communist. American politicians like Congressman Stephen Solarz turned the screws on funding for Taiwan as it refused to democratize. The event that precipitated Taiwan’s democratization was an assassination in Daly City, California. Dry Duck, a Taiwanese gangster, walked up to Henry Liu, a China-born American citizen, and shot him in the driveway of his suburban California home. American politicians were pissed that the government officials deep in the Taiwanese authoritarian government had authorized a hit in the US. The assassination in California was the moment that Taiwan’s authoritarian government began to unravel, and Taiwan began the transition to democracy.

 

Xinjiang:

• In 2022, the Michelle Bachelet at the UN issued a report arguing that China had committed “serious human rights violations” in Xinjiang in constructing a system of concentration camps and forced labor factories where Xinjiang’s Muslims were imprisoned. 
• This is a genocide. The government is forcing many Uyghur women to become sterilized. In 2019, in Khotan, a city that is 96% Uyghur, the government  budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations, meaning that the government was going to try to sterilize about one third of all women of marriageable age. From 2015 to 2018, the birthrate in Khotan and Kashgar, another mostly Uyghur city, dropped by 84%, from 1.6% to .26%. In the concentration camps that the government made for Uyghurs, women were frequently injected against their will with Depo-Provera, a birth-control shot. In 2018, 80% of all IUDs in China were inserted in Xinjiang, a province with 1.84% of China’s population. 
• Why is Beijing doing this?
• China has long fought over Xinjiang. Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has claimed “since the Han Dynasty established the Western Regions Frontier Command in Xinjiang in 60 B.C., the Chinese central governments of all historical periods exercised military and administrative jurisdiction over Xinjiang.” That is false. Chinese forces controlled the region from roughly 60 BC to 0 AD and then from roughly 70-100 AD. Then it controlled the region from 640 AD to the 750’s. For the next millennium, no Chinese power would control Xinjiang until 1758, when Qing China took control of Xinjiang. Since then, Beijing has ruled over the region as a colony, fighting with the locals. 
• And what of the locals? Uyghurs claimed to have lived in Xinjiang for 6 millennia. That is also false. The first Uyghur Empire was established in the middle of modern Mongolia in 744 A.D. and the Uyghurs had nothing to do with Xinjiang. In 840, this empire collapsed, and some Uyghurs fled to the eastern corner of Xinjiang, setting up a small state there. But from 1500 to June 4, 1921, the Uyghurs disappeared. No one alive during this period would have said, “I am a Uyghur.” The Uyghurs, who had long been Buddhist, Christians or Manichean, but they largely hated Islam. Until the 1400’s. During this period, most Uyghurs went from hating Islam to becoming Muslims, and the ethnonym Uyghur, associated with anti-Muslim feeling, disappeared. When it reappeared, in the 1910’s, it came to denote the people not just a corner of Xinjiang but almost all of the Turkic speaking peoples settled in Xinjiang. 
• Xinjiang has long been fought over by Chinese, Uyghur and other groups. The region is a clusterfuck of different identities, and no one is indigenous to the region. Today’s genocide is another part of that long fight over who ought to rule the region.

 

Economy:

• Beijing says that universal values like freedom of speech, liberal economic policies and checks and balances don’t jive with China and its ancient civilization. In fact, the biggest economic catastrophes in Chinese history were when Chinese leaders abandoned these “American” values. 
• In 1069, Emperor Shenzong and China’s leading left-winger, Wang Anshi, pushed a government takeover of the economy, eliminated the relative freedom of speech that had previously been allowed and spiked the checks and balances of Song Dynasty China. The economic results were a disaster and caused Song China to almost collapse and split in half. 
• In the 1950’s, the Chinese Communist Party took over the government, but initially allowed the old economy to hum along as it had before. In the latter half of the 1950’s, Mao eliminated the relative political and economic openness of the first half of the decade. First, in the Hundred Flowers campaign, he slammed those who criticized him and made it so that no one was willing to call Mao out for his nonsensical ideas. Then, in the Great Leap Forward, the government ditched its relatively liberal economic policies for hardcore collectivization. The result was the world’s most deadly famine.

 

Ask me any question you want about the history behind the topics Trump and Xi are discussing!

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Has anyone been hiking in the Cascades in the past week or so? What are the snow levels like right now?

With the opening of the Cascade Lakes Highway, I was thinking about going up to get some hiking in.

Has anyone ventured into the Cascades yet?