Other People’s Thoughts
This is the seventy-third chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
***
As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series includes videos and illustrative material. My thanks to the photographer Lois Conner for allowing China Heritage to use some of the work that she made during her February 2026 trip to Beijing. Lois was in the Chinese capital for the opening of a major exhibition on the Italian architect Andrea Palladio at the National Museum of China to which she contributed a series of works. Thanks, too, to Callum Smith, our webmaster, for designing greeting cards to mark the advent of the Year of the Horse.
For the other essays commemorating the 2026-2027 Year of the Horse in China Heritage, see:
- The Little New Year
- On the Cusp of Fire — The Flaming Horse and The Blood-red Ram
- Snakes Retreat with the Advent of The Horse
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
17 February 2026
First Day of the First Month of
The Bingwu Year of the Horse
丙午馬年正月初一
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-LXXII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, LXXIII
***
Beijing Valentine
Happy Valentine’s Day to the couples separated by prison walls because they dared to stand up to the CCP! (In the pics: Chow Hang-tung & @ye_du, Xu Zhiyong & @liqiaochu01, Ding Jiaxi & @luoshch, Jimmy Lai & Teresa Lai.)
— Wang Yaqiu, X, 14 February 2026
Back in Beijing and life is good. Gotta love a place where they’ll deliver 包子 at 11:30 at night and they arrive steaming hot, plump and delicious.
— Kaiser Kuo, X, 15 February 2026
The Moral Test
The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.
Melania the movie
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.
— Xan Brooks, Melania review – Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest, The Guardian, 30 January 2026
‘She sure did pull herself up by the G-string.’
— Vox Pop comment from a New Yorker, 30 January 2026
Speaking of ‘Shithole Countries’
We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot – such a lot – about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they’ll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let’s use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by ICE agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat – an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level by Donald Trump’s politburo. Then that evening in Washington, a lot of those same politburocrats turned out for the White House premiere of a ridiculous propaganda film about the president’s wife, also attended fawningly by bloodless Apple oligarch Tim Cook. And he’s not even the oligarch who paid an insane amount for the film. Top line, guys: all this makes you look like what your president likes to call a “shithole country”. Sorry! I assume it’s fine to use officially licensed vocabulary?
— Marina Hyde, Masked thugs and terrified citizens: we used to have a name for this, The Guardian, 27 January 2026
Tim Cook, Apple CEO
‘But where Tim is sitting there, he’s saying to himself, I’m going to give this guy a gold amulet like I did a couple of months ago, I’m going to shove my whole head up his ass because of the situation that’s…
[Swisher:] ‘That’s the next season of Heated Rivalry. Go ahead.’
‘No, but come on, you can barely see Tim’s ankles hanging out of Trump’s ass, right? You know that, okay?’
— Anthony Scaramucci to Kara Swisher, The Cost of Corporate Silence on ICE, Pivot, 28 January 2026
A Bitter but Spiritually Liberating Powerlessness
… only a few writers, strikingly almost all of non-Western ancestry, have taken the risk of pointing out truths distorted or concealed by interlocking class and ideological interests. As Kaveh Akbar put it recently: “It is excruciating to be the Muslim in every room forcing people to think about genocide, but I do not have the luxury of shitty cynicism or breezy despair.” It is also excruciatingly awkward for me, a nonresident alien (in IRS parlance), to say this: that the liberal American intelligentsia seems to have relaxed too cozily into imperial cultures of exaggerated self-esteem and self-satisfaction. A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries; its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.
… there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.
— Pankaj Mishra, Speaking Reassurance to Power, Harper’s Magazine, August 2025
The Recessive Cultural Gene of the United States
“…we spent decades building a deep economic, social and cultural relationship within a country that can change its character very quickly. Economists told us integration would make two countries incapable of harming each other,” said Homer-Dixon. “But this idea of ‘might makes right’ has always been this recessive cultural gene of the United States. And we fooled ourselves into thinking it had gone away. But it has re-emerged to the surface because it never left.”
— Leyland Cecco, The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Trump is revives old fears, The Guardian, 27 January 2026
AI
As someone who’s been studying AI for 10 years, here’s what I keep coming back to:
- AI can generate a hundred drafts in an hour but not tell you which ones are good. Only you can develop your sense of taste.
- AI can answer any question but it can’t tell you which questions are worth asking. Only you can nourish your curiosity.
- AI can do whatever you tell it but it can’t want something on your behalf. Only you can decide the direction of your effort.
- AI has made some human skills redundant but others have never been more important.
— Alberto Romano, 29 January 2026
Genocide denial is a master class in logical fallacies
Here are 10 of the most common types used against those who speak out:
- Ad Hominem Attack: “You’re an antisemite.”
- Straw Man: “So you think Israelis should just roll over and die?”
- Whataboutism: “What about Sudan? Congo? Iran?”
- Red Herring: “Do you know what Hamas does to gay people?”
- False Dilemma: “The alternative is genocide of the Jews.”
- Special Pleading: “How could a people that suffered the Holocaust ever be perpetrators?”
- Appeal to Authority: “Israel investigated itself and found no evidence of genocide.”
- Argument from Repetition: “You have to prove intent.” (Repeated endlessly even after South Africa submitted extensive, publicly available evidence to the ICJ.)
- Circular Reasoning: “Israel can’t be committing genocide; it’s a democracy, and democracies don’t commit genocide.”
- Moral Inversion: “Do you know how offensive it is to accuse a historically victimized people of genocide?”
As Israel and its U.S. backers continue terrorizing Palestinians—while clearing rubble and obstructing accountability for their crimes—we will not unsee what we’ve seen.
We will not forget this.
We will not stop speaking out.
Free Palestine.
— Kuros Charney, Substack, 29 January 2026
Do’s and Don’ts
They are saying citizens can’t protest in the streets (1st amendment).
They are saying citizens can’t carry a gun if they do protest (2nd amendment).
They are saying citizens and local businesses must feed and house federal agents occupying their city (3rd amendment)
They are saying they don’t need a warrant to enter citizens’ homes (4th amendment)
They are saying they can detain and deport anyone they want without a court hearing (5th amendment).Our founding fathers made these the top of the list for a reason: without these rights we are living under tyranny.
— Richard Samul, Substack, 30 January 2026
***
Your Mountainish Inhumanity
Cut their throats!; fire a gun into their face!; shoot them multiple times in the back!; incarcerate the innocent!; ….and wash your vile minds with tears!….and cleanse your Christian sins with false religious confessions — contrary to all Christian teachings!
***
Epstein’s appeal was an insidious gift of permission. Girls, tax evasion, private places to play. An underground railway of upper-echelon decadence.
— Tina Brown, Sex, Lies, and the Epstein Files, Fresh Hell, 2 February 2026
Addicted to Swearing
On Friday, Patriarch Kirill addressed lawmakers in the lower-house State Duma, urging them to “find a way” to strip the “spiritual disease of foul language” of the popularity it currently enjoys in Russia.
“Although public profanity is legally classed as a minor offense, in practice, it’s becoming more accepted in society,” he said. Under Russian law, which defers to police and prosecutors to define curse words, using obscenities in public is punishable by a fine or up to 15 days in detention.
“We need to find a way to deprive swearing of the popularity it has been given. This is a battle for people’s minds and even their hearts,” Patriarch Kirill said. “If we could fight obscenities just as we now strive to fight alcoholism, it would… break with the tradition that defiled and deformed Russian culture and harmed human communication,” he told lawmakers.
— Russian Linguists Call for Protection of Curse Words, The Moscow Times, 2 February 2026
A Golden Age for China’s Online Censors
The labor of censorship was at once crucial and tedious. On average, each editor processed 3,000 posts per hour. A 40-person team processed three million posts every 24 hours; divided into four teams, they alternated shifts, completing a 10-hour day shift and a 14-hour night shift every four days. Like Eric, most team members were recent college graduates, willing to put in long hours for low pay: a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan ($490), roughly the same wage as a local carpenter. His entire team was made up of men. According to his managers, women did not have the stamina to handle night shifts.
At the office, there wasn’t any chatter; employees rarely socialized. All day, all he heard was the whirring of mouse wheels scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and every now and then, a pause, followed by a definitive click — the sound of a post being deleted, disappeared. The office was unremarkable: cramped cubicles separated by yellow dividers, identical laptops. A banner across the ceiling read, “The big eyes of Chinese people around the world.” The only anomaly was the lights — bright fluorescent tubes switched on 24 hours a day to keep employees productive. Sometimes, when Eric got sleepy during a night shift, he’d sneak in a quick nap on the floor next to an empty cubicle. A myth circulated among Weibo users that posts made between 3-4 a.m. would remain untouched.
— Liu-Yi Ling, A Day in the Life of an Internet Censor, China Books Review, 5 February 2026
中央紀委國家監委
用好批評和自我批評這個銳利武器
“有話要放到桌面上來講”
打開窗戶說亮話不要藏著掖著
私下議論 背後放炮有話放到桌面上講
很可能是揭傷疤 戳痛處 很可能有些辣味
但只要實事求是 切中要害帶些辣味又何妨？
多一些辣味盡量多發現一些問題 多解決一些問題
使之真正觸及思想 觸及靈魂
最終達到“團結一批評一團結”的目的
Degenerate Semites
For twentieth-century antisemitism, zionism is to be celebrated, because it is the means by which Jews stop being Jews. These argumentative, annoying stateless, landless people with their angles and their jokes, why can’t they just be solid and boring and of one opinion like the rest of us? With Israel they become so (or were supposed to). Max Nordau’s contribution to founding zionism was the idea that Jews would change themselves by founding a homeland, and those who didn’t join would be the worst of the worst (Nordau’s key work was Degeneracy, a broad argument about Western decline, of which he saw Jewish moral decline as a subset; his ideas about the degeneracy of modernism pretty much matched those of the Nazis, who implemented them).
— Guy Rundle, Notes on the Present, 6 February 2026
كل شي: The Price of Everything
In a widely circulated clip from a finance conference last year, Mansour says that “the long-term vision is to financialise everything, and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion”. Hence “Kalshi” — the name derives from “everything” in Arabic. “Some of it could be the future of, like, climate change and the future of our politics, and others can be, like, sports because a lot of people care about that,” Mansour tells me.
Yet only a vanishingly narrow slice of the world’s interesting questions have yes-or-no answers. And even those can slip into headachy epistemological mazes. For example, did the US “invade” Venezuela when it killed military and security personnel and snatched its president? Polymarket, Kalshi’s offshore rival, ruled that it had not, and one trader complained that the site had “descended into sheer arbitrariness”.
— Kalshi chief Tarek Mansour: ‘We’re pricing the future’, Financial Review, 6 February 2026
Entering the High Touch Era
In January alone, I’ve done Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, seen my orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. I’ve renewed my health insurance and medspa membership. I’ve drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. My current skincare routine is 6-8 steps, my daily supplement stack is 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and a peptide taken subQ, and I’ve engaged at least 5 high-tech tools from my home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). I’ve tracked every meal, macro, and relevant micronutrient. All of this, and I consider myself pretty healthy and not hypochondriac. I am n=1, but I am not alone here.
— Laura Reilly, Magasin, 3 February 2026
The Seduction of Noam Chomsky
Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy. If there is a lesson here, it is this. The ruling class offers nothing without expecting something in return. The closer you get to these vampires the more you become enslaved. Our role is not to socialize with them. It is to destroy them.
— Chris Hedges, Substack, 8 February 2026
***
Nina Simone, Revolution, 1969
***
oligarchs gonna oligarch
The purpose of having f##k you money is to say f##k you, but it seems the purpose of f##k you money is to have more f##k you money. …
… as all the nerdy dreamers bulked up into heedless plutocrats, it was like watching a chart of the Descent of Man—their muscles bulged to comic-book proportions, their aspirations coarsened, they hid out in their luxury, blue zone caves. I think most of them had set out with a genuine belief that tech could make the world a better place, but they wound up instead wanting just to better their OWN place.
— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 9 February 2026
The Real Epstein Class
… utterly amoral networkers and nepotists with no loyalties to anything but their absurd bank balances and party invitations. And this is their administration. From the dime-store Versailles that Trump is constructing on the rubble of the East Wing, to the Gaza wasteland where Jared Kushner is now preparing to cash in after the slaughter, this is a kleptocracy notable for its callousness as well as its insatiable money-lust.
— Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish, 14 February 2026
Minimal China Maxxing
“Being Chinese like Eileen Gu once every 4 years is just about right; being Chinese every day is a bit too challenging (像谷愛凌一樣每四年當一次中國人的頻率正正好，要是每天都高強度當中國人就過於有挑戰性了。)”
— Yaling Jiang quoting from Threads, 7 February 2026
The literrateur
Epstein did seem to feel that all of his reading gave him a more profound and insightful spirit. Much has been said about literature’s capacity to improve our moral sensibilities, but Epstein seems to point, on the contrary, to literature’s ability to corrupt us or justify our corruption. Identifying himself with the Bard, he once wrote: “I understand, shakespeare understood, competing loyalties.. follow you highest principle. truth, really, and do it sooner rather than later. it will not endear you, but will garner respect.” In the end, he was less of a King Henry and more of an Iago.
— Julia Kornberg, The Drift, 13 February 2026
Slave to War
Putin doesn’t live like ordinary people. He can’t imagine life without power, or after it. The everyday concerns of real societies don’t interest him. His reference points aren’t living advisers or the world as it is today, but dead emperors and faded maps. He consults Tsar Peter and Empress Catherine more than he consults anyone who understands modern life.
He may see himself as a tsar, but in truth he’s a slave to war, trapped by it, defined by it, unable to exist without it.
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 62nd Munich Security Conference, 14 February 2026
Berlinale 2026
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a whimsical film that I wrote 38 years ago, was selected to be screened under the Classics section at the Berlinale 2026. There was something sweet and wonderful about this for me.
Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza. This is what made it possible for me to think of attending the screening of Annie at the Berlinale.
This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.
Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime.
If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.
With deep regret, I must say that I will not be attending the Berlinale.
— Arundhati Roy
At the press conference on Wednesday, [head of the Berlinale jury Wim] Wenders said in response to a question about the political side of the festival: “We have to stay out of politics. If we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight to politics.”
However, in a statement made to the press in India, Roy said she will now not attend, in response to what she described as “unconscionable statements made by members of the jury”.
“To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” she said. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
The Berlinale has responded, saying it “respects this decision,” and added: ”We regret that we will not welcome her as her presence would have enriched the festival discourse.”
— Orlando Parfitti, Berlinale responds to Arundhati Roy’s withdrawal from the festival, Screen Daily, 14 February 2026
***
