秦晖：苏联式国家的「测不准原理」

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKvtgqrvL8

Sam Altman returns to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727206187077370115

BTW, ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users.

https://fxtwitter.com/OpenAI/status/1727065166188274145

The Shadow of Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang’s reputation has fluctuated over the decades. During the Cold War, he was a highly divisive figure. Chiang ruled Taiwan as a dictator, carrying out brutal repression of pro-democracy opposition

The late 1970s were a low point for his reputation: forgotten in the U.S., despised by Taiwan’s increasingly democratic public and reviled as a loser in the Chinese mainland.

The next two decades saw a remarkable shift in perceptions of Chiang. His reputation remained low in Taiwan, where calls for his legacy to be revised or rejected grew increasingly strong. But ironically, even as his reputation shrank on the island he had ruled for so long, it began to grow in China and the West.

The implication of Pantsov’s title is that mainland China today is the sort of market authoritarian state that Chiang Kai-shek would have favored.

Coble’s deep research shows the danger that comes from warring elites within government: top leaders vie with each other as the economy collapses.

Pantsov, Alexander V. 2022. Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-Shek, China, 1887–1975. Translated by Steven I. Levine. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300271690.

Coble, Parks M. 2023. The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China’s Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009297639.

Historical provinces of China (Republic of China).

https://fxtwitter.com/yiqinfu/status/1727119520224170465

Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Cuisine

Chinese food in the U.S. and the West in general was largely created by Cantonese immigrants.

China had a very turbulent time during the twentieth century, it was closed to the outside world and ended up being seen as a poor country.

Chinese cuisine was not seen as prestigious. By contrast, Japan got rich first, and in turn, Japanese food has become elitist and expensive, with people willing to shell out vast sums of money on things like sushi. Chinese food has got stuck in the “everyone’s favorite neighborhood takeaway restaurant” bracket, and not really seen as being very sophisticated, or worth spending money on.

The earliest written recipes in China were medical prescriptions found in some Han dynasty tombs.

Chinese people, particularly the older generation, talk all the time about food as medicine, and what to eat for particular ailments. They say food and medicine come from the same source.

Chinese people have the same hang ups about the food from other regions that Europeans used to have: English people used to be snooty about the French for eating snails and frogs’ legs, for example. In China, southerners think the northerners eat nothing but boring old flour and mutton.

But there are unifying characteristics.

One of the most important is the use of chopsticks to eat food that is cut into small pieces.

Another extremely important difference is the use of the soybean, and fermented legumes

China has always had a very gastronomic culture, but it was suppressed for decades. People then craved meat and other delicious foods. The nineties saw the beginning of a Chinese economic boom and the availability of food in a way that there hadn’t been for some time.

It has been a very male dominated industry. The explanation always given is that it requires huge strength to operate a wok.

When I was first in China, people were often cooking over coal fires that were very hot and relentless, and the woks are heavy, it’s physically intense. So it’s seen as something that’s physically demanding, and also probably not very feminine in a social sense.

No feature

After a year of observation, experimentation, and testing, we may have found a careful response to the challenges we face with AI. In fact we ended up doing the opposite of adding ChatGPT.

In our next post, we’ll talk about the problems of writing with AI. The final piece of the puzzle will come together with the release of iA Writer 7, our careful answer to AI. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear about the next steps.

https://ia.net/topics/no-feature

Hillenbrand, Margaret. 2023. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/hill21214.

On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. At the heart of the book is China’s underclass: as a social presence, a political threat, and an affective force. I argue that the ranks of the immiserated in China, the largest underclass in human history, frequently endure much more than inequality, exclusion, and insecure work. Their experiences are better understood in the idiom of expulsion, which they suffer on multiple fronts; banishment, for them, is a flexible and hydra-headed thing. It ranges from forced eviction to life-changing workplace injuries to the extraction of back-breaking labor without pay. But it’s consistent in that it deepens estrangement from the polis for those already condemned to lesser life.

Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.

这本书的封面是行为艺术家 Li Wei 的作品《29 层自由度》 “29 levels of freedom” 2003.

The art of Li Wei

不明白播客 EP-074 李老师：白纸运动是开始，不是结束

今天我们请来了李老师，请他谈一谈这一年他观察到的中国人的变化，在这个时代做一个发声的人要付出了哪些代价，他有没有想放弃的时候，他为什么喜欢用「雪花」这个象征，为什么喜欢谈「爱」，他如何避免在与怪兽搏斗的时候自己也变成怪兽，如何看待头号反贼这个称呼，以及他为什么认为白纸是开始而不是结束。

https://www.bumingbai.net/2023/11/ep-074-whyyoutouzhele/

A comparison of ChatGPT API pricing and human costs, which suggests the listening should cost about the same as the producing.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bitinn/111469007916147997

Institutional Genes: Totalitarianism in China by Professor Chenggang Xu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8F-BZmJDy0

哈佛大学固体力学家锁志刚（Zhigang Suo）最近当选为中国科学院外籍院士，他在 Twitter 上分享了这一消息，下面的评论大部分是恭喜之类的祝福，但也有一些评论谴责锁教授接受「作为 CCP 实体」的中国科学院。中美关系的紧张，对两国间学术合作的影响可见一斑，但如锁志刚自己说的那样：Decoupling science is as futile as decoupling air.

US extends science pact with China: what it means for research

https://www.tg-me.com/TomBen’s Web Excursions/com.tombenor/4542

最近有一本关于清朝行政制度的书…… 的书评很火。

这本书是：Dykstra, Maura. 2022. Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674270954.

本书的作者戴史翠认为，在十八世纪，清朝因为想要打击腐败和加强中央集权，行政文书的数量呈指数级增长。然而，帝国成了自身成功的牺牲品。由于这场「行政革命」，产生的文书越来越多，发现的腐败和渎职行为也随之增多，到了十八世纪末，忧心忡忡的皇帝们意识到他们的衰落已经开始了。

针对这本书的两篇书评文章是：

- Qiao, George Zhijian. 2023. Journal of Chinese History, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2023.19.
- Keliher, Macabe. 2023. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186323000469.

这是我第一次看到书评文章几乎通篇都在批评一本书，例如前者直言不讳地批评道：The book is conceptually, methodologically, and factually unsound，后者稍微委婉一点：It seems that historians of the last era already provided an answer to the question. A convincing book offering another answer—or even how the Qing used the archive to centralise power—still remains to be written.

这本书还有一个 维基百科 词条，可以在这里看到更多的评论。

尽管如此，我觉得这本书的 dedication 倒是写得很好 🤣

The admission rate of China’s annual public service examinations is now similar to Keju in the Qing dynasty (around 60:1 to 90:1).

https://twitter.com/ZhangTaisu/status/1728773626126549469