Asia and China news

“What does the Geniza provide? It provides something of you from the bottom up, I would say, so we get more glimpses of everyday life. The cache of materials are really dense. So we have an interconnected cast of characters, and we're able to tell different kinds of histories from the ground up that we don't necessarily have the same opportunity to tell on the basis of sources that people have focused on more so over the last century and a half of scholarship.”

“One of the most conspicuous ones are gifts of enslaved people between different sovereign rulers or between vassals and sovereign rulers. And so we find in, for example, Chronicles, that when this Caliphate had just founded the new city of Cairo as their imperial capital... this was a way that diplomacy was done. And in turn, the Fatimid Caliphs will send their own gifts of enslaved people and eunuchs even to the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“The slave trader in the period that I study, it mainly appears as a diffuse capillary network in which small numbers of enslaved people are parts of mixed cargoes, and they're sent with handlers through a series of ports until they reach their final destination. This capillary network could stretch all the way to India if you're a merchant in Cairo. And so we have Jewish merchants, for example, who were traveling to Indian Ocean, and they write home and they say, look, I purchased a six-year-old girl for the lady of the house.”

“In Islamic law, there's an extra benefit that enslaved women have in particular that doesn't exist in Jewish law. And it's because of patrilineal dissent in Islam. So a Muslim man can legally use an enslaved woman for sex and her child is a freeborn Muslim. So the child is born free and the mother, the slave mother, she gains limited protection. And in most schools of Islamic law, she can't then be sold or separated from her child.”

“In Jewish law, the moment a Jewish slave owner purchases a person, that enslaved person enters a liminal category in which they're neither fully Jewish, but neither are they non-Jewish. Take a second to digest that. It is confusing. They're a kind of Jew, but not fully. This, I think, imparts dynamics in the Jewish community where enslaved people... there was a sense that they were part of the Jewish community in a provisional, tentative sense.”

“The important thing I want to underscore is that both in Islam, both in Jewish culture and religion, like slave owners tell themselves stories of good and bad slave owners. And so they really, and this is important because they never arrive, I don't think, at a critique of slavery as an institution, because they are focused on like the problem is what slavery has done badly. And that unscrupulous men don't follow the laws of slavery like they should.”

“Maimonides says, look, it's better that he free her and marry her. In other words, it's better to take the lesser of these two evils. So this shows you that, like, there's not sort of one single mind about slavery, even in through the writings of one individual. And so the way slavery was thought of, like, it's really dependent on context. It is both moral sort of challenge, perhaps moral evil. It is also seen as something that's prestigious.”

“Everyone in the Mediterranean, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, understood that depending on the place they're in, they are vulnerable to enslavement, whether if it's through capture and war or through piracy. We have evidence that Jewish leaders were trying to raise money to redeem Jewish captives, and that was seen as a sort of obligation that the community had. All people are vulnerable to slavery, but also it's very common that those same groups are people who own slaves.”

“I think we can characterize this strategy mainly by two things. One is pragmatism. He's been very, very pragmatic in his approach to China. He avoids this kind of idealistic or wishful thinking narratives about China, the global order. He thinks that China is a highly successful and powerful authoritarian system with a model of state capitalism.”

“In Spain, frankly speaking, you know there are many issues that are very heated debate, many issues of the political agenda, even on foreign policy. Sometimes China policy has been a state policy, so it's been quite consistent. I would bet that if or when the popular party leads the central government in Spain, they would follow a similar approach to the one that Sánchez is following.”

“All these debates about the industrialization in Europe, they are here now and they were not here eight years ago. So these three things, like COVID, Russian-Chinese relationships in the context of war in Ukraine and this macroeconomic imbalance, these three things make Sánchez have, to some extent, a critical view on China or this idea that the security dimension of the relationship is more important to Sánchez than it was to Merkel.”

“Trump seems like the attractive international role, not simply push away a little bit, pushes Spain away from Washington or pushes Spain away from this current US administration, but also increases China's appeal as a stabilizing force for Spanish foreign policy. Because there is more need for this kind of a stabilizing role of China.”

“Bilateral goods trade exceeded 55 billion last year, up nearly 10 percent, and yet the trade deficit keeps widening. China now accounts for a staggering 74 percent of Spain's total trade gap. So what is Sánchez actually up to? Is this a sophisticated bid for strategic autonomy, a bid for a Spanish brand of leverage between Washington and Beijing?”

“This Chery investment in Barcelona... is good because you have the infrastructure there, you have the knowledge there, people there, and now you have again another foreign car company that is willing to invest there and put this back to motion, back to track. This is very welcome, but again, the devil is in the details because the actual economic impact for the Spanish society is very different, whether you localize or not, for example, your value change.”

“Spain has some comparative advantages when it comes for promoting cooperation with Latin America, because the Spanish diplomatic service, Spanish companies, Spanish academia, we all have very intense networks there. We have a lot of knowledge of what's going on on the ground there. Before COVID, Chinese companies had bought three times more assets from Spanish companies in Latin America than in Spain.”

“Donald Trump is creating such sense of discomfort, such sense of disruption among the US traditional allies that these countries are forced, to some extent, these authorities are forced to look also to other alternatives. I think it's wider. We have the example of Canadian prime minister. It's not only in Europe.”

“To get to the question, what the United States wants, the United States does not know what it wants. We're in a moment right now where to state the obvious, the old consensus has come apart. I think that memo first landed with Trump's election in 2016. There was a brief interregnum in 2020 where it seemed that we got through this weird anomaly, this hiccup of Trumpism, and now we're ready to get back to the business of running the world and upholding the so-called rules-based order. But it turned out that for years, and Trump proved again in 2024 that this is an enduring phenomenon.”

“One is there's been a 40% increase since 2024 in the extent to which the American public has friendly, a sort of friendly disposition towards China. It's now at around 53%. I mean, this is an extraordinary figure. There's a partisan gap, as with most things in the United States right now. Two-thirds of Democrats and one-third of Republicans have a positive, friendly attitude towards China. But I think that, and that's significant, but even one-third of Republicans is significant. The big shift is the overall headline number.”

“If you're going to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific... that's going to mean that we're going to need our allies and other theaters in particular to take on more of the burden. Now, I think one of the biggest threats to our ability to do that is what we're seeing happen with Iran right now. Iran is a factor that we have to acknowledge and talk about because in order to do prioritization and to actually maintain integrity of having four key lines of effort, it's going to come at the expense of other things.”

“We have an affordability and energy crisis in this country. You can't buy any gas turbines to get more generation online. And so China has excess capacity in solar panels and also makes pretty good batteries that are fairly cheap. Maybe we can think about creatively what China could bring to the table in terms of solving some of those issues and what the governance strategies would be for extracting some kind of learning out of that investment if it were to come.”

“Nobody is more confused than America's allies about what the United States wants. And this is especially the case when it comes to China. I've sat in a lot of meetings recently where Europeans have said, what does the United States expect of us in our relationship with China? Sort of generally, but concretely, what would you like us to do? I think it was, there was actually tremendous clarity around the Huawei issue. Now, I think it's a little bit uncertain.”

“The US has lost 100% of its credibility on promoting human rights on the global stage. And if part of the mechanism is, if it were to kind of make that a prominent part of its policy, it would have this dilemma of how do you get everybody to buy in to, hypocrisy has always been a huge issue for any great power, certainly for the US. It's historically put a lot into its democracy promotion and support of human rights. But the hypocrisy thing has kind of gone off the charts.”

“In Pāṇini's case, his goal was not to describe language or to produce a conventional grammar either. When we say Pāṇini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit, which is an ancient Indo-European language, what he was doing is he was trying to build a linguistic machine. It seeks to represent linguistic information or language itself in mechanical terms, in mechanistic terms.”

“Then in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules—and potentially wiped away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines and led to some grumbling among other Sanskrit professors.”

“In the event of a conflict, apply the rule that comes later, going from left to right, because we write Sanskrit from left to right. So, the rule that comes later, as in the operation that applies to the right hand side part, the right hand, the right most part basically, if there are more than two rules. And that, to my surprise, solved all these problems.”

“Whereas in the case of Sanskrit, a lot of that work happens within the peripheries. So there is an affix and often there is an infix and so on. A lot of the action, structurally speaking, happens within the bounds of a word. So you can imagine morphology and phonology do a lot of heavy lifting in an ancient Indo-European language like Sanskrit.”

“We have come to accept complexity and complication as a proxy for brilliance. But I think this is only one of many examples that we have access to as human beings of the fact that simplicity and elegance in presenting a complex web of information is what constitutes genius and not complexity.”

“The tradition interpreted later as the rule that comes later in the serial order of rules, and there are 4,000 of them arranged in a particular traditional order. That created many problems, and the first person to notice that was Kātyāyana. All the commentators that came after him did exactly that. You can imagine how unimaginably complex things got based on the mistake that the first commentator made.”

“However, this is an algorithm that Pāṇini has devised. What is an algorithm? It is a clear set of instructions, so that you might be able to always achieve the desirable outcome. In mechanics, the fact is Pāṇini had created what I call a perfect algorithm to tackle the problem of rule conflict, which was misunderstood right from the first commentator's time.”

“Wang Yi has done two major phone calls with his Iranian counterpart. ... Shifting from solidarity with Iran to de-escalation pressure, to me is really, really, really interesting. It's the result of this extensive shuttle diplomacy that China's special envoy to the Middle East conducted from March 8th to about the 25th in which their special envoy to the Middle East, a guy named Zhai Jun, went around to all the countries.”

“I think we're at a reordering moment. The post-Cold War era is done. And we're now in a transitional interregnum between the old order and a new order. And right now we're going through the order dissolution process more than we're going through an order creation process. And I think that that order dissolution process is especially disorienting for Asia because of the centrality of the US to both the region's security and its economic development.”

“You have the Asian response, principally Japan, South Korea and Australia, which is to double down on the alliance, pull the US closer. We saw that with Taki Ichi's visit just a few weeks ago, right? Basically, hold on to the US and the alliance and hope a better day comes.”

“I think Putin is an enormous, extraordinary beneficiary of this operation because of course it takes all the global attention off of Ukraine. It diverts scarce US military resources away from weapons transfers to Ukraine and more to the Middle East. It makes Putin look just as justified in his military invasion than anyone else.”

“To me, on the energy security question, the key issue is the debate about energy security in Asia only about price and as a result, a macroeconomic issue that central banks and finance ministers manage or does it become about access to quantity? ... That could redound to the benefit of the United States because as you know, Mike, we are a net exporter of LNG and there are all sorts of interesting LNG projects.”

“Having the US tied down in a complicated air, naval and missile war in the Middle East only redounds to China's benefit and to Russia's benefit as well. ... At the end of the day, Mike, what does Iran really get China? Geographically, the Chinese don't really get much from it. It's principally a market where they could invest, but it's been difficult to invest in Iran.”

“What's happening is the Chinese are becoming a source of premature deindustrialization for economies in the region. In particular, the auto sector in Thailand, apparel, textiles, and steel in Indonesia, e-commerce in Vietnam. Because the Chinese are just flooding these markets with exports, as a way to keep their manufacturing economy alive.”

“On June 30th, 2007, just hours after leaving home and presumably the party at LaSalle, Thieu was seen entering the elevator at Marine Terrace with two young men, her friends Raghuille and Amaud Daniel, two friends she had hung out with a bunch of times before. Seeing as this was the last confirmed camera sighting of Thieu, police went and checked it out.”

“Thirteen years later, investigators tried again by tracing these possessions, hoping that even a digital footprint, a serial number, or a transfer could lead to something concrete. That trail led them directly to someone they already talked to, Ahmad Danyal bin Mohammed Rafai. One of the two men Do had visited that night she vanished, was actually in possession of one of the items on that list.”

“When Ahmad and Regue woke up six hours later, they found Dew dead. They weren't doctors, but they very likely saw obvious signs of someone no longer alive, like the person not breathing. As they began to panic, they landed on the most logical cause of death, the drugs. But instead of calling for help, the two men decided to keep it between themselves.”

“Using drugs in Singapore is a major offense, and it is rarely ever met with leniency. They could go to prison for 10 years, and if it resulted in the death or injury of someone else, that sentence could go up to 20 years. Once outside, the criminal duo took a taxi and headed off to Punggol Track 24, where they then dug a hole, put the box in there, lit it on fire, and then covered it back up with dirt.”

“Ahmad returned to court on October 14, 2022. He officially entered a guilty plea, not for murder, but for the related charges of obstruction, theft, and disposal of a corpse. The judge sentenced him to 26 months in prison, one month less than what the prosecution had recommended. Given that Ahmad had already spent significant time in remand, most of his sentence had effectively been served.”

“Raghu, who had been 32 in 2020, was no longer living in Singapore, so the police listed him as a fugitive, possibly living overseas by this point. He was placed on a wanted list, and an international search was initiated. On the day Ahmad Daniel's name hit the news, Raghu's social media accounts, including his LinkedIn profile, were deactivated.”

“The Chief Justice was not swayed. He ruled that the murder charge would remain suspended and not withdrawn until they had heard Regueil's side of the story. At this point, I have zero hope this guy will ever show up willingly. We already know he's a coward and selfish, so why would he risk his life to try and help a friend? He already let one down in 2007 so what's another one?”