GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data contains spam and porn phrases, causing concerns among users. The tokens used by the chatbot include inappropriate content, affecting its ability to understand Chinese prompts accurately. Experts suggest better data cleaning and filtering to improve the chatbot’s performance.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/17/1092649/gpt-4o-chinese-token-polluted

https://gist.github.com/ctlllll/4451e94f3b2ca415515f3ee369c8c374

Why Is China Producing So Many Export Goods, Anyway?

Theory 1: Economic stimulus

Theory 2: Overcapacity/underconsumption

Theory 3: Comparative advantage

Comparative advantage explains balanced trade — I give you soybeans because I’m good at growing soybeans, you give me cars in exchange for soybeans because you’re good at making cars, and so on. It can’t explain unbalanced trade — you give me cars in exchange for IOUs. Trade surpluses and deficits require ideas that go beyond comparative advantage.

Theory 4: Forced deindustrialization

Theory 5: Xi Jinping’s techno-historical theories

This might sound like a bunch of Marxist mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually not very different from how other countries think about technology, industry, and the national interest.

Theory 6: War preparation

All of these theories could be true at once. Or perhaps only some subset of them.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-is-china-producing-so-many-export

高华的后二十年（上）：《红太阳》是怎样升起的

18 年后，高华在接受独立导演胡杰采访时，披露了彼时心境。「我感觉到，我应该写。第一，我认为这件事很重要。第二，我自己有些想法。第三，我是学历史的研究历史的，似乎也看了很多东西，可以把这部分感受先写下来，至于写得怎么样，将来能不能出版，当时都没有考虑。」

「写这个过程，时间很长。我当时给自己一个想法，就是你应该写，你要摆脱一种内心的恐惧，摆脱各种各样的禁忌。」

这种恐惧，后来被景凯旋称为「一种存在意义和形而上的恐惧」。「这是我们这一代人普遍具有的状态，80 年代我们读卡夫卡，90 年代接触《正午的黑暗》、《1984》之后，就很能够理解这种恐惧感。」景凯旋说。

这是一部后来被海外学者看作「高华教授受个人痛苦经历刺激，以及思考国家巨变有所感触的发愤之作，酝酿二十载，辛勤七个寒暑而成的著作」。该书凡 705 页，参考文献长达 31 页，分档案文献集 6 种，年谱、文集、资料汇编 136 种，报刊、期刊 19 种，著作、论文、传记、回忆亲历资料 338 种，英文论著 6 种，为第一部全部利用大陆公开资料，系统梳理延安整风运动前后过程及其影响的专著。

这本书通过对延安整风运动的起源和过程的深刻剖析，解释了毛泽东如何根据其理念将「马克思主义中国化」：毛泽东在整风中运用思想改造和审干、肃反两种手段，全面清除了中共党内存留的「五四」自由民主思想的影响，彻底转换了中共的「俄化」气质，重建了以毛泽东为绝对主宰的上层结构，奠定了党的全盘毛泽东化的基础，其间所产生的一系列概念、范式，在 1949 年后改变了亿万中国人的生活和命运。

https://dasheng.media/articleDetail?id=72

Ma, Chicheng. 2024. “Classicism and Modern Growth: The Shadow of the Sages.” The Journal of Economic History 84 (2): 395–431. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050724000111.

This paper examines how the worship of ancient wisdom affects economic progress in historical China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-nineteenth century. Using the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited industrialization between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism. This finding implies the importance of cultural entrepreneurship, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth.

秦晖教授 2024 年 5 月最新演讲：关于五四的再思考（哈佛费正清研究中心）

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30GhAT63o08

前几天读到这篇文章，我想起之前读过的一篇博士论文致谢中关于高华的内容，但当时没找到。今天看到这条 Tweet 中「现在的上海展览馆，建造于中苏交好时期」，突然就想起了那篇博士论文《上海中苏友好宣传教育运动研究（1949–1965）》。

How China’s New Left Embraced the State

China’s New Left thinkers shifted towards embracing the state, seeing China’s success as a model of advanced socialism. They advocate for the superiority of the Chinese system and engage with Western socialist ideas to rejuvenate Chinese socialism. Despite internal challenges, they align with Xi Jinping’s push for socialism with Chinese characteristics.

https://chinabooksreview.com/2024/05/16/how-chinas-new-left-embraced-the-state

How to Walk and Talk: Everything We Know
https://kk.org/thetechnium/files/2023/12/howtowalkandtalk.pdf

These were the critical final years when the Cold War was drawing to a close, and there were nearly simultaneous democracy movements in several other parts of the world. “People power” successfully brought down the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, student demonstrations in South Korea led to a democratic presidential election in 1987, and in that same year Taiwan repealed martial law and legalized the formation of opposition parties, becoming a genuine multiparty democracy. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, beginning the unraveling of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China ended very differently.

35 years ago today, June 4, 1989, Poles ousted the communist party in the first partly free elections since WW2. The election set off a chain of events that led to the opening of the Berlin wall. The USSR's European empire had collapsed by the end of the year.

Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese army fired on Tianamen Square protesters, ending any hope of political change. The massacre helped inspire the Chinese communist party to create the total surveillance state they are completing today.

https://journa.host/@anneapplebaum/112556790042181586

二零二三行香港记

在香港访学时，我认识了一位很可敬的老师，她听到小胡的案子，问我，你明知道没有结果还要撞墙吗？我对她说，因为我觉得我能提供程序价值；因为我觉得有些事，在更远的未来，会开花结果。

https://telegra.ph/%E4%BA%8C%E9%9B%B6%E4%BA%8C%E4%B8%89%E8%A1%8C%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E8%AE%B0-05-30

Environment in Asia Series Discussion: Stevan Harrell’s “An Ecological History of Modern China”

05:07 The first thing is we have to remember that China is a repressive regime and is putting innocent people in prison for life sentences. I’m gonna say a lot of good things about China in this talk, but I don’t want people to forget that, especially during the sad time.