The Pilot Who Held Up His Email
On January 24, 2001, a Chinese fighter closed to within twenty feet of an American surveillance plane.
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The Emperor Has Some Clothes
Essays on modern China. Each one starts from a documented event: a midair collision, a market halt, a port lease, a fire in Urumqi.
The Emperor Has Some Clothes
The Emperor Has Some Clothes
Essays on modern China. Each one starts from a documented event: a midair collision, a market halt, a port lease, a fire in Urumqi.
The Circuit Breaker That Lasted Four Days
On January 4, 2016, the new circuit breaker tripped.
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Red Health Codes for the Henan Depositors
In the first week of June 2022, a 38-year-old software engineer from Jiangxi province bought a train ticket to Zhengzhou.
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The Girl Found After the Search Stopped
At 7:30 on the evening of July 23, 2011, lightning hit a signal assembly on the Yongtaiwen high-speed line near Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province.
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The Rose Garden Line and the Bunkers
In September 2015, Xi Jinping stood beside President Obama in the Rose Garden and said China had "no intention to militarize" the artificial islands it had built in the South China Sea.
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A Life Sentence for Zhou Yongkang
Zhou Yongkang had sat on the Politburo Standing Committee, the handful of men at the top of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Water Where the Fuel Should Have Been
In the summer of 2023 the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force lost its leadership.
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The Thursday Fire in Urumqi
The fire started on a Thursday evening, November 24, 2022, in a residential tower in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
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The White Sphere Over Myrtle Beach
On February 4, 2023, at 2:39 in the afternoon, an F-22 Raptor at 58,000 feet fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder at a white sphere drifting between 60,000 and 65,000 feet over the Atlantic, six nautical miles off Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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The Great Hall Declaration of February 25
On February 25, 2021, Xi Jinping stood in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and said China had achieved a complete victory in its fight against poverty.
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Twelve Days Out of Libya
On February 22, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi's security forces opened fire on protesters in Tripoli, and the Libyan state started to come apart.
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Nine Days After the Bund Speech
On October 24, 2020, Jack Ma stood at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai.
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One Hour Before the Anniversary
On June 30, 2020, at 11:00 p.m. local time, the National Security Law for Hong Kong took effect.
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Fine Wine and Shotguns in Stockholm
On March 12, 2020, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a tweet suggesting the United States military might have brought COVID-19 to Wuhan during the Military World Games in October 2019.
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Nine Missiles After the Songshan Landing
On the evening of August 2, 2022, a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-40C carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed at Taipei Songshan Airport.
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7,648 Cracks in the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam
Between 2013 and 2026 China put about 1.399 trillion dollars into more than 150 countries under the Belt and Road Initiative, the program of overseas roads, ports, railways, power plants, and digital links announced in Xi Jinping's early years.
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Fourteen Grievances and a Submarine Pact
In April 2020 Australian foreign minister Marise Payne called for an independent international investigation into how COVID-19 started.
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Ninety-Nine Years on Hambantota
In December 2017 the government of Sri Lanka signed a 99-year lease that handed operational control of Hambantota port to China Merchants Port Holdings.
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The Score Wired Described in October 2018
In October 2018 a feature in Wired described China's social credit system as one algorithmic score given to every citizen, deciding whether that person could board a plane, get a loan, put a child in school, or book a hotel.
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Three Hundred Days Inside the Grid
In September 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray sat before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and described a campaign the intelligence community had named Volt Typhoon.
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Six Months Across America in 1988
In 1988 a Chinese political scientist named Wang Huning received a fellowship to spend six months traveling in the United States.
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The Village Factories the State Did Not Plan
Yasheng Huang, an economist at M.I.T., has spent two decades irritating the standard story of Chinese growth.
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Sixty-Two Cases and Four Clean Wins
Across sixty-two cases spanning twenty-five years, the chapter's ledger is not the one either camp wanted.
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